Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

  There was no need to say anything else. Thorne’s failure to observe the correct legal procedure might well have done some damage to the case against Jeffrey Prosser, but there was no arguing with a confession, every word of which had just been monitored and recorded.

  Helen Weeks left the gun where it was.

  Prosser looked as though he were about to burst into tears, but when the sob exploded, it was from Javed Akhtar’s throat and not his. Akhtar stepped then staggered backwards and only the steadying hand of his wife prevented him from crashing into the rack of metal shelves behind him.

  ‘My sweet, sweet boy,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Stop it, Javed,’ Helen said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Akhtar smiled at her, and looking at him it seemed to Thorne that the inside of his mouth was black, that he looked old and ill suddenly under the striplights. ‘You see I was not strictly honest with you either, Helen. Not that I’ve been lying exactly, but… ’

  ‘You did what you thought was right,’ Nadira said.

  ‘I was the reason he was in that courtroom in the first place, do you understand?’ He was swaying slightly and his eyes were wide and wet, staring at Helen Weeks. ‘I was the one that turned him in. I gave my own son up to the police, because I trusted in the law to do the right thing.’ His words were coming in short bursts now, thrown up on noisy breaths. ‘I told him that everything was going to be fine. I told him not to worry. He came home covered in blood, you see? It’s all right, he told me. It’s not mine, it’s not mine.’ He turned to his wife. ‘You remember he said that?’

  She nodded, clinging to him.

  ‘Not my son’s blood,’ Akhtar said. ‘Not his blood. Now, I am the one covered in my son’s blood. Drowning in it.’ He began to sink slowly towards the floor and his wife took his weight, and kissed his head and shoulders as she eased him gently down on to the canvas bed.

  Thorne turned and took the gun from Helen Weeks.

  He put a hand on Prosser’s back, eased him towards the doorway.

  He knew there was no need to shout.

  ‘We’re coming out,’ he said.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  The light from the arc lamps outside flooded the shop as the shutters rose and once again Thorne was forced to shield his eyes against it. Through the curtain of drizzle he could not see anyone clearly beyond the lights, but he knew that there would be guns pointed into the shop. Trained on Akhtar, or perhaps even on him. With a loaded weapon still inside, albeit in theoretically safe hands, the Silver Commander would be taking no chances until everyone, hostage taker included, had been safely removed from the premises and was in custody or undergoing basic medical checks.

  Or, in the case of Stephen Mitchell, on their way to the mortuary.

  Thorne stood framed in the open doorway, a few feet back from the entrance, in the centre of the wrecked shop. Helen Weeks was to his immediate left while Javed and Nadira Akhtar stood close together on his right. Prosser was just behind them, sitting slumped on the overturned fridge.

  Holding the barrel between two fingers, Thorne slowly lifted the revolver high and squinted into the light.

  He shouted, ‘Emptying the weapon.’

  He carefully released the catch that allowed the cylinder to swing out, then turned the gun, so that the unfired rounds spilled on to the floor. He leaned forward and tossed the gun out through the doorway. It skittered across the pavement and came to rest in the road, just a few feet away from the abandoned Passat.

  ‘Here’s how we do this.’ Donnelly’s voice was tinny through the loudhailer. ‘We bring the civilians out first.’

  Thorne was wondering if that included the surviving hostage, when Donnelly answered his question.

  ‘Sergeant Weeks second, and then last of all Inspector Thorne can walk Javed out of there. Is that clear?’

  Thorne said that it was.

  ‘Right, let’s have Mrs Akhtar and Mr Prosser front and centre.’

  Thorne nodded to Nadira. She moved slowly away from her husband, her hands deep in the pockets of her anorak. Thorne turned and saw that Prosser was already on his feet, eager to be out of there.

  ‘Now the pair of you start walking,’ Donnelly shouted. ‘Nice and steady, out of the front door and straight towards the lights. Is that clear?’

  The judge and the newsagent’s wife both nodded and began to move.

  ‘There will be officers waiting to meet you.’

  Prosser pushed past Thorne. In his hurry to leave he lost his footing in a tangle of plastic and paper, but regained his balance and stepped in front of Nadira, clearly desperate to be the first one out of the door.

  She paused, let him go ahead.

  Thorne doubted that there were still any weapons trained on the shop, but he understood nevertheless why Nadira Akhtar was raising her hands.

  Thought he understood.

  Then he saw the wink as the blade caught the light, and, as the arm came down, Thorne was already shouting out Nadira’s name and driving himself forward. Trying to push her aside in an effort to get to the judge before she did. Taking her to the floor, then stumbling and crawling to where Jeffrey Prosser lay on his side, legs bicycling wildly and one hand flapping at his neck.

  At the scissors that were sunk up to their yellow plastic handles into it.

  Thorne heard cursing, running footsteps.

  Someone screamed, ‘ Paramedics… ’

  The blood bubbled up through Thorne’s fingers and away, soaking into magazines and damp newspapers. Prosser gagged and began to shiver. He opened his mouth and the blood ran into it.

  Then someone was telling Thorne to move and pulling him away from the injured man. There were uniforms and medical bags, a good deal of shouting. And some time after that, when the shouting had stopped, Thorne found himself sitting on the floor of the shop with his back against the wall, and he noticed that Helen Weeks was holding on to him.

  A female officer leaned down and wrapped a space blanket around Helen’s shoulders. Helped her to her feet. Helen kept hold of Thorne’s hand until the last possible moment.

  She looked down at her palm. ‘You’ve got blood on you.’

  ‘Always,’ Thorne said.

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  LIKE A HOLIDAY

  SEVENTY-TWO

  ‘Got everything back then,’ Thorne said.

  Antoine Daniels was sitting on the edge of his bunk, leaning forward to stare at the TV screen in the corner and using a joystick to control a zombie or a soldier or an alien or whatever was noisily killing equally unidentifiable creatures on his PlayStation. His room was on the Gold wing and, though it had the same basic layout as the one in which he and Thorne had last spoken, the furnishings were a little less basic, presumably because the occupant was trusted not to smash everything up on a regular basis. As well as the television and games console, there was carpet of a sort on the floor and – surely the biggest perk of all – an ensuite shower. Though he instantly despised himself for thinking it, Thorne decided that he had stayed in marginally worse hotels.

  Daniels shrugged. ‘I’ll lose it all again.’

  ‘Why?’ Thorne stood in the doorway to Daniels’ bathroom. He could see the small tablets of soap and the bottles of shampoo all neatly lined up on a shelf above the sink.

  ‘Because someone will say something that winds me up and I’ll twat them.’ The boy screwed up his face as he performed a complicated on-screen manoeuvre. ‘Someone always says something.’

  ‘About Amin?’

  ‘About all sorts of things, man. Amin, yeah… ’

  ‘They know what happened?’

  ‘Whispers going round, you know how it works. Doesn’t matter to some of these boys how he died, why he was killed, any of that. He’ll always be the “Paki poof”, you know? My Paki poof.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No need,’ Daniels said.

  Thorne did know how it worked among the inmates, but thou
gh such things were rarely an enormous surprise, the reaction in other areas to the circumstances surrounding Amin Akhtar’s death had been even sadder and more depressing.

  There was talk of an official inquiry, but it remained muted.

  Twenty minutes earlier, over tea in his office, Roger Bracewell had run fingers through his floppy hair and thanked Thorne for his sterling efforts in uncovering the truth. He took great pains to describe his profound shock and sadness at what had happened at Barndale. He said ‘shocked’ three times and ‘saddened’ twice.

  Thorne had counted.

  Several times he had simply said Ian McCarthy’s name, then sat there shaking his head, as though momentarily dumbfounded at the actions of his former colleague. When he was being somewhat more talkative, he told Thorne that Barndale’s peripatetic art teacher had initiated a special project in tribute to Amin Akhtar. Those boys who were contemporaries of Amin would be given the opportunity in class to create paintings or collages that summed up their memories of their murdered friend and their feelings about what had happened. The work would then be displayed in some of the prison corridors as a permanent reminder of tragic and unacceptable events.

  ‘On the Gold wing, probably,’ Bracewell had said. ‘You know, if we want them to remain permanent… ’

  Daniels set his joystick down, though Thorne could not be sure if his game had finished or not. ‘Did you come specially to see me?’ he asked.

  ‘You deserve to be told exactly what happened,’ Thorne said. ‘And I wanted you to know that the reason Amin never told you about that stuff in his past was because he was trying to forget about it. I think you were helping him forget.’

  Daniels smiled, then looked embarrassed about it. ‘The doctor and that other one are going to prison for a long time, right?’

  ‘It’s not up to me.’

  ‘Definite though, yeah?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Thorne said. ‘All three of them.’

  While Prosser recovered slowly in hospital after life-saving surgery, McCarthy and Powell were on remand for conspiracy to commit murder. Rumour had it that Powell was already talking about a deal of some sort, but it was out of Thorne’s hands now. He did know that when it came to a reduction in charge or sentence sought, both men stood more of a chance than Nadira Akhtar. She was in Holloway, awaiting trial for the attempted murder of Jeffrey Prosser, while her husband had been charged not only with kidnapping but with the murder of Stephen Mitchell. As things stood, both faced the possibility of life sentences, but there was at least a glimmer of hope for Javed Akhtar. Carl Oldman, who had offered to defend him, told Thorne that having seen the statement made by Sergeant Helen Weeks, the CPS were considering a reduction in the charge to one of manslaughter.

  ‘I won’t be able to keep him out of prison,’ Oldman said. ‘But bearing in mind everything that happened, I’m hopeful we’d get a jury that was sympathetic. Not to mention a judge, of course.’

  Javed Akhtar would at least get the fair hearing his son had been denied.

  ‘What about the kid that actually did it?’ Daniels asked. ‘The Scottish one.’

  Johnno Bridges had yet to surface, but Thorne was confident that he would. ‘We’ll find him.’ He stepped out of the doorway and walked over to where a row of drawings had been taped to the wall. ‘It might well be dead behind a skip somewhere with a needle in his arm. But he’ll turn up.’

  Daniels leaned forward to pick up the joystick again. ‘Good of you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Coming back. You didn’t have to.’

  Thorne walked to the door. ‘You got a year left, right?’

  ‘Eleven months.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘See what happens.’

  ‘Try and make sure you don’t come back.’

  ‘I hope he is alive when you find him,’ Daniels said. ‘The one that gave Amin the drugs. Be nice to get him back in here.’ He glanced up at Thorne for just a second before he started playing his game again. ‘Then I’d definitely lose my fancy room.’

  Daniels was not the only boy Thorne had wanted to see on his return to Barndale. While talking to the governor, he had asked after the two boys he had met in the library last time he was here. He discovered that Darren Murray had been released two days earlier. ‘Pleased as punch at becoming a father,’ Bracewell had told Thorne with a knowing smirk.

  Thorne guessed that the boy’s maths had not improved, but decided that it was probably best that way for all concerned. The other boy, Aziz Kamali, was still an inmate, but as yet Thorne had not seen him. On his way to the Gold wing, he had put his head round the door to the library, but the boy was not there. Now, walking back towards the main entrance, Thorne watched as Shakir, the imam, came sweeping around a corner with a gaggle of eight or nine followers close behind him. Though now wearing the obligatory skullcap, and looking a lot more serious than he had done that day in the library, Thorne recognised Aziz Kamali among them.

  On spotting Thorne, the imam and his followers changed course, veering towards him like an articulated lorry switching lanes.

  Shakir told Thorne how pleased he was to see him. He talked about Amin in reverential tones and made the same sorts of noises the governor had made. Thorne waited politely for the priest to finish, then stared over his head and spoke directly to Aziz.

  The boy would not look at him.

  ‘Given up on the science then?’ Thorne said.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Eyes screwed tightly shut, he screamed up into her face, bouncing on the mattress in time to his keening and pulling hard at the edge of the cot. He leaned his head against the bars then rubbed his gums against the padded vinyl. He fell suddenly silent for a few seconds, as though he had forgotten what it was he was so upset about, then stared up at her, his lip quivering, and raised his arms.

  ‘Come on then, chicken,’ Helen said. She heaved her son up and placed his hot, sweaty head against her chest.

  His cry was still the only thing that could rouse her – waking her almost instantly, completely – and three weeks on from it, she remained amazed that she was sleeping so well. Sleeping at all. Even that first night, she’d been spark out in the back of the panda car before it had arrived at her sister’s place. Stretched out on the sofa an hour later, with Jenny still waiting not very patiently for juicy details and Alfie wriggling on her chest.

  Sleep of the just, her dad would have called it.

  She turned the dial on the musical mobile that was clipped to the edge of the cot. She murmured and shushed and padded around the small bedroom on her bare feet. She rubbed and patted and Alfie’s nappy was heavy against her hand.

  ‘Right, chicken.’ She carried him across and laid him down on the single bed. Leaned across for the changing bag. ‘Let’s sort you out.’

  She smiled, remembering.

  I slept like a baby last night. The pair of them in the pub with a few mates. Paul, a pint or two in, and on a roll. Woke up every hour and shat myself!

  Releasing the poppers on the baby grow, she decided she was definitely going to call her DCI first thing. She was ready to go back to work, had been within a day or two if she were being honest. She felt fine and there was nothing she needed to ‘come to terms’ with. She did not need any more ‘time and space to recover’ and she was not up for introspection.

  Not any more.

  Imagining herself walking back into her office, the faces of her colleagues, she thought again about the things she had told Javed Akhtar. Those first few minutes after she was taken out of there, she had studied the face of every officer she’d come into contact with and wondered which of them had been listening in to her confession. How long it would take before the gossip spread as far as her own unit. By the time she was washing the blood off her hands, she had decided that she didn’t really give a toss, that she had more important things to worry about.

  She lifted Alfie’s legs up. She pulled the dirty nappy away and dropped it in
to a nappy sack. She wiped him down, struggling to keep him still, then began to slather on the cream.

  Within a day or two of her release, it had become obvious that nobody had told Donnelly or anyone else exactly what had gone on in that storeroom at the end. Nobody had talked about the gun being held at Prosser’s head. She racked her brain, trying to recall if Thorne or Prosser had said anything while it was happening that would have given the game away to those listening in, and began to realise that she had got away with it.

  Same as she had with Mitchell.

  They talked about her bravery from day one, her resilience. Holed up in there with a gun to her head, knowing that she too could be killed if she let on that her fellow hostage had already been murdered. They talked about the strength of her character.

  Mentioned a medal, for God’s sake.

  Tom Thorne had known that keeping Mitchell’s death secret had been her decision. When they found their first moment alone together, he told her that he’d suspected it almost as soon as he’d been sent that picture of Stephen Mitchell’s body. He hadn’t said anything. He disposed of his mobile phone as soon as he had the chance. He had enough secrets of his own, he told her, so keeping another one was hardly going to get him into any more trouble.

  Thorne did not seem overly burdened by guilt at the way things had panned out, which was fine, because neither was she.

  Been there, done that, bought the hair T-shirt.

  The way she heard it, Nadira Akhtar was not exactly overcome with remorse either and Helen had no real problem with that. She would never forget the look on Javed Akhtar’s face though, when he had finally revealed just why his guilt was so poisonous and so all-consuming; why the ravenous cancer of it would never stop sucking at him. He had smiled at her and looked as good as dead.