Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Oh don’t worry,’ Thorne said. ‘I know exactly who this gentleman is.’

  ‘So which one of them killed Amin?’ Rahim asked.

  Passing the table and seeing their food untouched, the waiter stopped to ask if everything was all right. Thorne said they were just in a hurry. He slipped the phone into his pocket and took fifteen pounds from his wallet to cover the bill.

  ‘I’ll organise a car home,’ Thorne said. ‘Do you need somebody to stay with you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Rahim said.

  Thorne pushed his chair away from the table, caught another glimpse of the plaster on the boy’s wrist. Said, ‘Let’s do it anyway. For me, all right?’

  FIFTY-ONE

  Sue Pascoe was on her way out of the girls’ toilets when she bumped into Nadira Akhtar who was on her way in. They swapped muttered ‘hellos’ as Pascoe stood aside to let the older woman pass. Then Pascoe exchanged a few words with the family liaison officer who stood waiting outside. She told her to go and grab some tea and that she would take care of Mrs Akhtar for ten minutes or so. When Nadira came out of the toilets, Pascoe smiled and said, ‘I’m guessing you could do with some air. Cooped up in here… ’

  ‘That would be nice,’ Nadira said.

  They walked the length of the wide corridor that snaked around the school hall, and through a small cloakroom. Training shoes were arranged in wire baskets and the rows of low metal hooks were still festooned with brightly coloured bags and coats abandoned two days before. The back door was unlocked. They stepped out on to an enclosed play area, equipped with games and apparatus for younger children and looking towards a well-kept playing field. There were half-sized football goals and a running track marked out in white paint. A zigzag of red and yellow cones.

  ‘I’m really surprised you’re still here,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘I need to be close,’ Nadira said.

  ‘Even so.’

  Pascoe knew that the policy in such situations as these was to get the relatives away from the site of the incident if at all possible. This could not be done against anybody’s will of course, but once reassured that they would be kept fully informed at all times, friends and family would usually be ‘forcefully encouraged’ to relocate. More often than not, they would be taken to a hotel that was sufficiently close to have them brought back quickly if the situation demanded it, but far enough away so as not to impede the operation. Far enough to enable a dynamic entry to proceed without needing to worry about the impact it might have on the relatives of hostage or hostage taker.

  Outside the range where gunfire might be heard.

  Though she knew Nadira would have had all this explained to her already, Pascoe ran through it again. She changed the emphasis, talking about comfort and convenience and fighting shy of any suggestion that they might want anyone out of the way. ‘Mrs Mitchell was taken to a nice hotel yesterday afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘Well, we could certainly not stay in the same hotel,’ Nadira said. ‘She and I had something of an altercation.’

  Pascoe reached for her cigarettes and was about to light one. She glanced at Nadira and asked if she minded.

  ‘Can I have one?’

  ‘Oh… help yourself.’ Pascoe offered her the packet. ‘I didn’t think, sorry.’

  Nadira said thank you. She pulled out a cigarette and leaned a little awkwardly towards the lighter. Pascoe lit her own, then watched as the woman, who was clearly not a regular smoker, took her first drag and puffed out the smoke without inhaling.

  ‘Javed would kill me,’ Nadira said, quietly. She took another drag then smiled, cocking her head one way then the other, the irony of what she was saying obviously not lost on her.

  ‘How do you think Javed is coping?’ Pascoe asked. ‘How is he… under pressure?’

  Nadira stared at her through a ribbon of blue smoke. ‘Pressure? I hardly think this is normal,’ she said. ‘This is not like the papers being late. It’s not like having the credit card refused at the cash-and-carry.’

  ‘I know.’ Pascoe fingered her ID badge. ‘I just meant generally. Is he the one that stays calm if something happens? Is he the one that starts to panic?’

  ‘He was calm that night when Amin came home,’ Nadira said. Her voice was suddenly a little quieter. ‘Not straight away, but once we knew what had happened. He was… measured, you know? I was all over the place, hysterical and whatnot, I’m sure you can imagine.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Pascoe said.

  Nadira took another puff. ‘It was because he was the youngest, I think. The most naive. That’s why I was wearing out the carpet at half past one in the morning and talking to myself like some mad woman. I kept calling his mobile phone and telling him to call me back, telling him he was being selfish and trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  ‘Stupid, I know, because he was a grown man more or less, but common sense has nothing to do with anything when all you can see is your child’s face and all you can imagine are horrors.’ She looked at Pascoe. ‘I was already blaming myself for the things I imagined had happened. We had known it was wrong, you see, that sixteen was still too young to be going into pubs, but he and his friend were only going for the quiz, so we let them go. He said he would not be drinking, that they needed to keep clear heads, and it made sense, him using all those brains God gave him to make a little money. He had shown me the cash they had won the last time, and he was using it to buy books for college, so we thought, where’s the harm, you see?’

  Another puff, then nodding as she remembered.

  ‘Javed had been in bed for hours already and it was only a few more until he would need to be up. I was telling myself that Amin had missed his bus or whatever. Telling myself that when he finally came home I would rant and rave and give him a good talking-to and then climb into bed thinking about what I was going to make him for his breakfast.’ She smiled, drew her thin scarf a little further forward on her head. ‘When I heard the key in the door I started laughing, because I’d been so foolish to worry.

  ‘My God, when I saw his face…

  ‘His eye was just a slit and his mouth looked like it had been chewed by a dog or something. I saw this dark stain on his jacket, which was buttoned right up to the neck and that made me very cross, I remember, because I’d told him it was cold and that he should have worn a sweater or something. When I asked him what had happened, he pushed past me and ran up the stairs. He locked himself in the bathroom and I followed him and that’s when I shouted for my husband. Javed came out in his underwear, swearing and yawning.

  ‘I tell him Amin is hurt and that he won’t come out of the bathroom. Oh yes he bloody will, Javed says and he starts shouting and hammering on the door, saying, “Open this bloody bastard door before I smash it in.”’ She took a fast drag on her cigarette, puffed the smoke out almost simultaneously from her mouth and nose. ‘Between the blows on the door, I could hear him sobbing inside, so I took hold of my husband’s arm. We stood waiting there on the landing and, after a minute or two, Amin opened the door.’ Her hand moved towards her mouth; the unconscious recreation of a movement she had made instinctively that night. ‘That’s when we saw all the blood. The same shirt I had ironed for him… crisp and white… his favourite shirt. Now it was pasted to him. It was sopping.

  ‘I was screaming and I asked him where he was hurt, and Javed was asking the same thing, and we were both reaching out for him. He was crying and he cried harder when he saw how afraid I was. He said he was fine… he was fine, and he told me not to worry about the blood.

  ‘“It’s all right, Mum,” he said. “It’s all right. It’s not mine.”’

  Pascoe looked around for somewhere to put her cigarette butt. Had she been alone, she would simply have flicked it away, but in this woman’s presence she felt the need to dispose of it properly. To be seen doing so. She leaned down and dropped it into the inch or so of water that had gathered in the base of a plant pot.

  ‘Would you mind?’
/>   Pascoe turned to see that Nadira Akhtar was holding out what remained of her own cigarette. Pascoe took it from her and dropped it into the pot.

  ‘You have any children?’ Nadira asked.

  Pascoe shook her head.

  ‘Your job is too stressful for that, I suppose. Everyone counting on you all the time. Such a big responsibility.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘Do you also talk to those people who want to kill themselves?’ Nadira gestured towards the far side of the playing field. ‘Last week there was a man up on a bridge over there… ’

  ‘I have done,’ Pascoe said. ‘To be honest though, that’s the sort of job they usually assign to someone with a bit less experience than I’ve got.’ She was about to say more, but stopped herself, wondering why she felt the need to brag in any way at all to this woman. To sing her own praises.

  She told Nadira it was probably about time to get her back inside.

  Nadira nodded, staring out across the playing field. ‘So what about you?’ she said. ‘How are you coping?’

  FIFTY-TWO

  ‘Stay strong… ’

  Pascoe had said that, whispered it at the end of the last call. Helen had told her that she needed to go – she was keen to get all the calls over with before anyone started asking about Stephen Mitchell – and Pascoe had said that she would call again in an hour. Then she’d said it, quickly.

  Stay strong. Where the hell had that come from?

  It sounded weird, oddly intimate, touchy-feely. Not the sort of thing Helen was expecting, had grown used to, not… professional. Then again, perhaps it was just Pascoe’s job to make it sound exactly as though she really was Helen’s closest friend. Maybe she reacted differently when the hostage was a copper.

  Or maybe there was nothing strange at all about what Pascoe had said, and it was just another of the thoughts that had begun to reel and crash aimlessly around inside Helen’s head. She’d looked into the faces of plenty of drunks and sky-high addicts in holding cells, met enough people whose minds were not functioning properly, temporarily or otherwise. She’d listened to the ramblings.

  She recognised the patterns.

  She was hot and it was sticky and she could not think what day it was without really concentrating. When she closed her eyes, the lights that swam around behind them exploded together and fused into faces: Jenny, Paul, her father. A man she’d seen on the train a few weeks before who’d smiled and who she’d fantasised about for several days. After a few moments, the lights trailed away like dying fireworks and the features began to dissolve. She tried to picture Tom Thorne, but couldn’t. Just a sketch, a shape, somewhere between sad and scary.

  She thought about Thai food and wine and a hot bath.

  She thought about Paul’s broken head and a bloom of blood.

  She thought about Alfie.

  It had been nine months, more, since she had last felt him sucking at her, having never really felt good about it, never felt relaxed or capable or natural like her sister had been. But now, thinking about her son’s drool drying on her neck and his fat little legs, she felt an ache in her breast as though she might start to leak at any moment.

  A pressure, building.

  She thought about the gun on the desk and the scissors in the desk drawer.

  Akhtar walked back in from the shop. He had cleared away the remains of their most recent meal: the crisp packets and empty cans, the ice-cream wrappers. He sat at the desk looking serious and for a few minutes neither of them spoke.

  ‘It seems that we have finally run out of things to talk about,’ Akhtar said eventually. ‘Perhaps we should watch some television.’

  Helen said she didn’t mind, but Akhtar did not move. He stared at her and when he rubbed his face, his palm rasped against the stubble. He smoothed down the hair at the side of his head and she could see the dark patches underneath his arms.

  ‘There are some programmes at this time of day you might enjoy,’ he said.

  ‘I told you it’s fine.’

  ‘I was thinking you might like it, that was all.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ Helen said, fighting to keep the irritation from her voice.

  Akhtar leaned across to switch on the television, then sat back clutching the remote. He flicked between the channels. The picture was far better on some than others.

  ‘Nadira tells me about these programmes,’ he said, sitting back. ‘She watches them at home in the afternoon, all curled up with coffee and damned chocolates, like some kind of princess, you know? Antiques and holidays and people moving to the countryside.’

  Helen nodded.

  ‘That’s all you get these days, isn’t it? Reality programmes or murder mysteries. Reality and crime.’

  Helen nodded again.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Akhtar said. ‘You’re sitting there thinking to yourself, look at where we are, for heaven’s sake!’

  Helen kept her eyes fixed on the screen, on the couple being led around a garden, tried hard to focus on the monotonous commentary. To distract herself.

  Thinking: Alfie, gun, scissors, Alfie, gun…

  ‘You’re asking yourself, why do we even need the bloody television?’

  Thinking: stay strong.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Thorne called Donnelly on his way to Barndale.

  He told him about the empty flat in Hounslow and about the forensic evidence linking Jonathan Bridges to the murder of Peter Allen. He told him that when Bridges had been in the hospital wing he was almost certainly responsible for giving Amin Akhtar the drugs that had killed him. He told him about the photograph on Jaffer’s phone.

  Donnelly was keen to know why Thorne was not on his way back to the RVP. Was this not the information that Javed Akhtar had been demanding? Thorne explained that there was no point until he had all the answers that were needed, until he could name names. That he could not go back to Akhtar again and say that while he still had a fairly good idea why his son had been murdered and was almost certain who had actually done it, he could not yet be sure who was ultimately responsible. He told Donnelly that until he was in a position to give Akhtar the whole story, it was not worth giving him anything. The man had not reacted particularly well to Thorne’s previous progress report and getting him worked up still further was definitely not what Helen Weeks needed.

  ‘It’s your shout,’ Donnelly said. ‘But the sooner you get the rest of it, the better.’

  Thorne said, ‘It’s got to be all or nothing.’

  He called Holland, told him who he was on his way to see.

  Holland asked if Thorne was planning on making an arrest and Thorne said he was not planning on anything, that he would be in there making it up as he went along. The last thing he needed was that kind of formality, the time-suck of the process and the paperwork. Then, of course, there was the small matter of grounds, the absence of anything but circumstantial evidence, however damning it appeared. Holland apologised for being overly pessimistic then asked Thorne what he intended to do if the man he was going to talk to did not immediately feel like confessing. Thorne said he would have to beat it out of him. Holland said nothing for a few seconds and Thorne laughed and told him he was joking.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Holland asked. ‘I can be there in forty minutes.’

  Thorne said, ‘I was joking, Dave. Half joking at any rate… ’

  He called Helen Weeks.

  They spoke for less than half a minute, but the strain was clear enough in her voice. She was hesitant suddenly, all but monosyllabic. She sounded oddly disconnected from events, as if the call had just woken her and she was not yet sure if she was still having a bad dream. Thorne could hear voices in the background and Helen told him she and Akhtar were watching the television. She and Akhtar and Mitchell. Thorne told her it was good to take her mind off things, that it made the time go faster. She was tired, she told him, but beyond sleep. She kept zoning out, but it worried her because
she knew she had to keep her wits about her.

  ‘Don’t want to drift,’ Helen said. ‘Need to stay sharp.’

  Thorne said, ‘Think about Alfie.’

  FIFTY-FOUR

  He got to the prison a little before five o’clock, and the man he had driven there to confront, though surprised at first, seemed happy enough to see him. Thorne was shown once again into the man’s office and his jacket was hung carefully on a metal hook behind the door. He was offered tea. The man sat down behind his desk and moaned for a minute or so about his heavy schedule and the day from hell he’d had already. He gave a ‘what can you do?’ shrug and said he would do his best to help, though he was a little pushed, and he wondered aloud what it was that Thorne had forgotten to ask first time round.

  Thorne smiled and walked back to the door. He took down his jacket from the metal hook and reached into the pocket for the phone.

  He was trying not to enjoy it.

  But not very hard.

  ‘Don’t get to a lot of parties myself,’ Thorne said. ‘I mean there’s usually a piss-up in the pub over the road if we get the right result in court, and every now and then the brass lay on some warm white wine and sausage rolls when they want to pat a few backs, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I went to a proper party. Where you can really cut loose and let your hair down, you know. Like this.’ He raised the phone and gave a little wave with it. ‘You can see it on people’s faces, can’t you? You can see that they’re just having the best time, because there’s something like… abandon or whatever you call it in their expressions. They don’t give a monkey’s, you know, and the best time to see it is when they don’t know they’re being watched. Even better, when they don’t even know they’re being photographed. That’s when you catch a glimpse of how people actually are, isn’t it? When nobody’s pretending to be something they’re not, when it’s all out there in the open and there aren’t any inhibitions. I mean, when you think about it, that’s the sign of a really great party, isn’t it? When people can just be themselves.’