“May I ask what you’re doing here, sir?” said the copper. His “sir” was a flimsy pretense at politeness, a paper flower poked into a turd. He had a hard, chiseled face, buzz-cut hair and eyebrows so blond they were barely there. His pale cheeks glistened with sweat.
“Sorry, Officer, we’re just about done here,” said Amobi. He reached for the keys hanging in the ignition and started the car.
“Would you mind switching your engine off, please?” The copper gripped the window rim as if he could hold the car back with one hand if he had to. I glanced over my shoulder and watched the other cop—skinny, spotty, younger than the first—stroll round to the rear of the car and stand muttering into his lapel radio, reading out the license plate. I was waiting for the moment when they’d realize their mistake and back off, groveling to Amobi, but that didn’t seem to be happening, and Amobi for some reason didn’t seem in any hurry to enlighten them. Instead, he meekly switched his engine off as instructed.
“Officer, we’re minding our own business, and we’re not committing any offense—”
The copper stood back and beckoned Amobi out with a crook of his finger. “Step out of the car for me, please.” The “sir” had disappeared, I noticed, and I could hear that familiar authoritarian tinge creeping into the copper’s voice—that smug, supercilious tone that dares you to answer with sarcasm or a smart remark, if you like the taste of pavement.
Sighing, Amobi opened his door and clambered out, leaving his jacket hanging in the rear, and shut his door carefully, so as not to appear to be slamming it in irritation. All of them seemed to be ignoring my existence; I wondered if the dumb coppers had even noticed I was there.
“Now I’m asking you again,” the first copper was saying to Amobi, “to tell us exactly what you’re up to here.” Up to…typical copper question. No matter how you replied to it you’d sound guilty and defensive.
“I was conducting some private business,” said Amobi. “Having a private conversation, that’s all.”
For Christ’s sake, I nearly spluttered, just tell them who you are! But Amobi, professional to the point of absurdity, seemed determined to maintain his cover.
“Not on the Police National Computer,” said the second cop to the first.
“Might I suggest you check again, Officer?” said Amobi, but the guy ignored him, droning like a droid into his lapel radio, conferring with his nick about a male IC3 in a blue Ford saloon—IC3 was Met police code for black, I knew—and requesting backup. I’d been stopped and harassed by surly cops myself enough times to know this encounter wasn’t going well—and unlike Amobi, I’d never made the mistake of having dark skin.
“Thing is,” said the first copper, with that same fake-friendly singsong tone in his voice, “there seems to be a problem with your car’s registration. It doesn’t appear to be on the database, which suggests it’s a false registration. So I need to see some ID from you and a registration for this vehicle.”
I could hear the exasperation creeping into Amobi’s voice when he started to respond, and so could the copper, because he didn’t wait to hear Amobi’s explanation.
“Word of advice, calm down, all right, and we’ll get this straightened out. Now, I’ve asked you twice—”
“I’m a police officer, OK? This is an official vehicle,” snapped Amobi at last, struggling to keep his voice low and even. “Detective Sergeant Philip Amobi, seconded to the NCA, and I’m actually on a case—”
“Seconded to who?” said the first copper, as if he couldn’t decipher Amobi’s faint Nigerian accent.
“The NCA—National Crime Agency—”
“You mean SOCA?” said the first cop. They’d clearly never heard of the NCA.
“Yes, SOCA!” replied Amobi, at the end of his tether.
“Well, that’s not the NCA, is it?” snorted the spotty copper.
“Look, I’m going to get my ID out, OK?” I saw both cops tense as Amobi raised his hands from his sides.
“Slowly, all right?” said the first copper.
Amobi brought his right hand down to his rear pocket, dipped his fingers in and rooted about. “Damn it,” he said, “it’s in my jacket—in the back of the car—”
“No, step away from the car, all right, mate?” said the spotty copper. “I’ll take a look.” He pulled open the rear door, unhooked Amobi’s expensive suit jacket, tugged it out and started patting it down for a wallet, letting it dangle inside out and drag along the gutter. Pens and papers started falling out of the pockets.
“Oh, for God’s sake, let—” Amobi reached for his jacket, and the first copper grabbed his arm and Amobi pulled it free, and an instant later he was slammed facedown onto the hood of his car with his right arm up in a lock behind him, the first copper pinning him down with all his weight while he yelled in indignation, “I’m a police officer! I’m a police officer!”
I pushed my own door open and climbed out. The first copper glared at me as he tried to control the writhing Amobi. “Back in the car, sonny, all right? We’ll come to you in a minute.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I don’t do guys in uniform.” From the look on their faces I could tell they’d already leaped to the wrong conclusions—that I was a rent boy and Amobi was a john—just as I’d hoped they would.
Amobi raised his head. “For God’s sake, Finn, tell them who I—” was as far as he got before the first copper slammed his head down again so hard it bounced off the hood. Amobi roared, incoherent with fury by now, and the second copper waded in too, ratcheting a handcuff tightly round one of Amobi’s wrists and fishing for the other wrist with the hook of the second, all the while shouting at me, “Don’t you move, all right? Get back in that car—now!”
I tilted my head to meet Amobi’s eye. “Really sorry, sweetie,” I said. “But you’re on your own.”
And I started to walk away. The second copper left the cuffs dangling and his mate wrestling with Amobi while he scrambled to grab me, but I ran for it. He was young and fit, but I was younger and fitter, and I wasn’t weighed down with half a ton of blunt weaponry, a stab vest and a bellyful of doughnuts. I avoided the crowds of pedestrians by running up the middle of the street, dodging the roaring buses and blaring cars, making sure I was heading in the opposite direction from the approaching sirens. Before I’d gone half a block a glance over my shoulder told me the copper had given up the chase and was bent over panting in the heat, ready to collapse. As I rounded the next corner I slowed to a walk, then immediately ducked into the blissful cool of an air-conditioned shopping mall, where I wandered for the next few minutes among cable TV sales stands and acrylic racks of fluorescent jelly sweets. I kept checking around and behind me to see if any would-be vigilantes had taken up the chase, but there was no one. Making my way through a side exit, I emerged into a bus station, where the hot stale air shook with the steady throb of huge diesel engines. A litter bin nearby overflowed with plastic bottles and greasy sandwich wrappers, and I paused, took Amobi’s NCA ID out of my pocket and tossed it in.
I’d filched it from Amobi’s jacket when he’d climbed out of the car to reason with the chisel-faced cop; I’d been hoping to cause him trouble somewhere down the line, but as things turned out, I’d succeeded right away. I could guess what would happen now: those two dumb cops would frog-march Amobi to their car—cracking his head on the edge of the roof as they shoved him into the backseat—and on arrival at the station they’d drop him as they helped him out again, maybe standing on his hands accidentally-on-purpose. He’d be banged up in a cell for an hour or two while his story was checked out, and then the horrified duty sergeant would dash to unlock his cell door and the uniforms who’d busted him would be crawling to Amobi on their hands and knees, pleading with him not to make an official complaint.
The thought of it gave me a warm feeling of achievement, but that didn’t last very long. The Turk was still holding Zoe, I had no idea where, and Amobi had been my final hope. Now he’d cut us both adrift.
<
br /> There was only one person who might be willing to help me, and that was McGovern. I was going to have to go back to him, ask him to take me in, and accept his hospitality and his protection. And then, at some point, I was going to have to kill him.
—
I headed back home the same way I’d come, by tube and bus, racking my brains all the way to try and figure out my options. There was no point in queuing up at the local precinct to report a kidnapping. Even if they believed me, I’d never trusted cops to do anything competently apart from batter drunks and claim overtime. Seeing two morons work over one of their own officers for being the wrong color in the wrong car hadn’t done much to change my opinion, even if I’d helped to make it happen.
And this time it was worse—it wasn’t that the cops would wade in and make a mess of it, but that they wouldn’t wade in at all. The Turk’s information had already foiled one bombing—he’d proved his worth. The authorities were so desperate for leads on the terrorists, of course they’d turn a blind eye to his dodgy business dealings. Why would they break up a gang war in order to save McGovern? They’d been trying to nail him for years, and had got nowhere; if the Turk could do it for them, the war would be over that much sooner and the cops would only have one villain to sort out instead of two. Zoe and I would merely be collateral damage.
What if I could tip off the terrorists somehow, let them know that the Turk was informing the police about their operations? For once the Turk would be facing an enemy even more vicious and demented than he was. Yeah, great idea—I just needed to find the terrorists’ website, or their email address. Maybe they had a Facebook page I could post on.
I felt bad about stitching up Amobi and getting him arrested, but not that bad. He hadn’t even looked at that video of Zoe. He must have known that if he did, he would have had to get involved—at least get the footage analyzed somehow. Everybody knew how the government was keeping tabs on the public these days; they probably had the technology to identify the smartphone that had taken that video, right down to the model number and the IMEI. There might even be a location tag embedded in the footage—but outside of Government Communcations Headquarters, the only person I knew with that sort of IT genius was Zoe herself. Maybe if I watched the footage again…I’d seen a movie once where the cops traced a phone call by analyzing the sounds they could hear in the background. Perhaps there’d be something in the footage I hadn’t noticed—a glimpse through the window of that room where she was being held, a distinctive noise…. It had to be worth a go.
Alone in my musty kitchen I plugged the memory stick into the laptop again and took a deep breath. The prospect of sitting through the footage again made me feel tainted somehow, like the sort of sicko who slows down at motorway pile-ups in the hope of catching a glimpse of a corpse. But Zoe wasn’t dead yet, of that much I was sure. And I was being prissy and pathetic—she was the one who actually had to go through the ordeal of being pawed and groped and God knew what else by Dean and the Turk’s other gorillas, and she wouldn’t give a toss right now how guilty or creepy I felt watching it. If there was any chance at all it could help her, I had to take it. I opened the memory stick’s folder, navigated to the video file, and clicked “play.”
The footage of Zoe on campus at York I’d already seen—it would tell me nothing about where she was now. I slid the cursor to the fast-forward button, then hesitated. Could there something in there I’d missed all the other times? I’d never made myself scrutinize it properly; I’d been squirming too much. I clicked on “play” and forced myself to concentrate, to focus on the moving image, to try and stay cold and analytical somehow. There was Zoe dragging her bike down the steps of her shared house…strolling through the campus…chatting to a girl…I’d seen that girl tagged in a Facebook picture—Molly somebody…?
I hit “pause” again. I opened up a browser and rooted around for the bookmark I’d set for Zoe’s Facebook page.
With dyslexia as severe as mine, just trying to read postings in that tiny little text gave me a migraine, so I hardly ever used Facebook. That had been my excuse, anyhow—I didn’t need to read her posts to know that Zoe was having a ball up there, far away from me. There were endless low-light pictures of her laughing at parties or moshing at gigs, and she always seemed to be among a crowd of hot girls and cool blokes, all at various stages of drunkenness. And lately Patrick Robinson’s languid smile had been beaming through more and more of her pictures like a smug little crescent moon. There he was beside her, picnicking in a summer meadow, one arm draped across her shoulders—pulling her close, or trying to. Here was a moody black-and-white picture of the pair of them hunched on a park bench in the rain, sharing what looked like a spliff.
It seemed all the more odd, then, that I hadn’t seen Patrick in the video footage.
I jumped back to the start of the video, clicked on “play.”
Zoe dragging her bike down the steps. The camera was on the far side of the road, opposite Zoe’s house. As I watched her yet again emerge and wrestle with her bike, I noticed again the guy coming in, who had to dodge out of her way—and there he was tagged on her Facebook page: Sunil, from her IT course. Now Zoe was chatting in the canteen, the camera zoomed in to the stud glinting in her nose—that girl she was giggling with, that was Molly again, with her hair pinned up, maybe because she hadn’t washed it that morning…still no sign of handsome Patrick anywhere.
What was that? The video had cut from the college canteen to Zoe in what looked like the library, but something had snagged on my consciousness, something so subtle I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it. I hit the “pause” button, found the control that moved the footage forward in tiny increments, and clicked on “reverse,” moving backwards one split second at a time.
Now we were back in the canteen. The image tight on Zoe’s face…I found the button to creep forward, and clicked it, once, twice….
There.
An instant before the cut, Zoe’s eyes flicked to the right, and she looked straight down the lens, and on her lips was the beginning of a smile.
six
I rang the doorbell of Zoe’s shared house in York and waited. And waited some more. Standing back, I squinted up at the windows, but there was no way of telling which of the residents were in or out. Maybe they’d split for the summer, maybe they were still asleep in bed at four in the afternoon. Either was possible—these were students, after all. I didn’t even know which room was Zoe’s, and it didn’t matter anyway—I wasn’t here to turn the place over for clues: I was here to talk to Patrick.
I took a seat on the cracked stone steps under the front door. Although it was old and crumbling, the house was pretty enough in its own way, with big sash windows that let in lots of light, and a long garden out the front that soaked up the noise of passing traffic. The grass was shaggy and full of dandelions—obviously none of the residents was into gardening—but it was thinning now and going yellow, longing for the rain that never seemed to come. As the grass died back an old bicycle was emerging from its depths, rusty and decaying, like a skeleton exposed on a dried-up lake bed.
I’d prepared a cover story in case any of Zoe’s other housemates turned up—that I’d come to visit Zoe, that I hadn’t known she’d left, had she and Patrick had an argument? I needed to speak to him…. Hopefully they would take it for a lovers’ tiff, some melodramatic triangle, and leave us to it.
If I was right about Patrick—that he had taken that footage of Zoe and passed it on to the Turk—it would take all my self-control not to leave his perfect smile looking like a row of broken bottles. He might hesitate before calling the cops, but his flatmates wouldn’t, and if I got done for assault up here in York I could end up remanded in prison for a week with no friends to bail me out. I did have a lawyer once, but after tangling with the Turk herself she’d fled to South America. And I’d pretty much burned my boats with Amobi that morning.
I’d been staring into space while all this went through my mind
, and Patrick was halfway up the path with his door keys in his hand before we saw each other. Even on this hot sticky day he radiated cool—designer shades, loud baggy shirt, baggy cargo shorts exposing muscular tanned legs—but when he saw me he froze. For a second or two I could see him wondering how to play this—innocent, baffled, bored, amused? He had to assume I knew nothing about his sideline doing surveillance for the Turk; he’d pretend to be the brokenhearted boyfriend abruptly abandoned by his sweetheart after I’d come up to visit, and that he had no idea where she was now. He wouldn’t invite me in—he’d ask me sullenly what I wanted.
“Hey, Finn. What can I do for you?”
“He’s got Zoe,” I said.
“Who has?”
“The Turk,” I said. Patrick had decided to go for baffled, I could see, and I made an effort to hold on to my patience.
“I haven’t seen Zoe since she ran after you,” said Patrick. “If you don’t know where she is, I sure as hell don’t. Excuse me, please, I’d like to go in.” He made to walk past me, but I didn’t shift from the step.
“He said he was going to—” I stopped. I really didn’t want to explain everything all over again, especially to this tall, handsome, treacherous smartarse. But then, how much did he actually know? Maybe he’d never met the Turk in person. Maybe he hadn’t known who or what the footage was for. Maybe this whole trip would turn out to have been for nothing.
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