Girl On Fire_DC Max Wolfe

by Tony Parsons

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. I have not done anything wrong. And I wish to return to my life.’

  I looked at Edie.

  ‘You’ve been in a cell at Paddington Green,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ve any idea of what is happening on Borodino Street.’

  ‘People are angry,’ he said. ‘They hate my sons for all the terrible things they did. And I understand. But their sin is not my sin.’ He lightly placed his hand on my arm for emphasis. ‘In the end, every parent loses their child,’ he said. ‘I know now that I lost my sons long ago. But I want my life back. And I will not allow my sons – or anyone else – to steal it from me.’

  Sir Ludo Mount joined us, giving me a little nod and completely ignoring Edie and Joy.

  The sleek old brief had a curiously offhand attitude to police officers of all ranks, as if we were dimwitted room service waiters who were hanging around for a tip.

  ‘I don’t think it is safe for Mr Khan to return home,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Khan is going home to Borodino Street as soon as his property is no longer deemed a crime scene,’ Sir Ludo told me, as if I had not spoken. ‘I understand from my sources that will be formally declared over the next twenty-four hours.’ The lawyer waved a well-manicured and dismissive hand. ‘Issue your Osman warning and leave us.’

  I took a breath.

  ‘Do you seriously want to put this family in harm’s way?’ I said. ‘Because that is exactly what is going to happen if they return to Borodino Street. Is that really what you want?’

  A faint flush appeared on Sir Ludo’s heavily moisturised chops.

  ‘What do I want?’ he said. ‘Is that your question?’

  He gave me the full theatrical blaze of outrage that had wowed a thousand courtrooms.

  ‘I want a complete investigation into the shoot-to-kill policy of the Metropolitan Police,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want. And I want a formal apology to the Khan family. I want a reappraisal of the way firearms are used in this country. I want all of that, and I want it done as soon as possible. And I want your colleague SFO DC Raymond Vann to be brought to justice for the death of Adnan Khan in that basement.’

  ‘I’m just trying to keep your client alive, sir,’ I said.

  ‘And I promise you that you will be in serious trouble if you fail to do so,’ he said.

  He left us, and with an apologetic smile, Ahmed Khan joined Sir Ludo and his well-spoken helpers at the dining table. They were young, eager, hard-working and totally in thrall to their famous master.

  The YouTube film was still running on Joy’s laptop.

  I could hear the anger of the mob and I could feel their appetite for blood.

  ‘What’s the drill?’ Edie said. ‘When someone wants to return home to the scene of a serious crime? To somewhere like Borodino Street?’

  I shook my head. There is no drill, Whitestone had told me on the Thames Path. Suddenly I was very tired.

  ‘If it is no longer a crime scene, and if Mr Khan wants to go home, then we can warn him, and we can advise him against it and we can hope that he uses common sense,’ I said. ‘But we can’t stop him.’

  ‘That selfish, stubborn old bastard,’ Edie said. ‘It’s not just him going back there, is it?’

  And on the other side of that safe house, Layla Khan pushed back her long black hair from her face, looked across at Edie, and I saw her smile for the first time.

  13

  The noise on a firing range mangles your senses.

  The close proximity of continuous live gunfire is the opposite of deafening. When you stand in one of the booths at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Gravesend, Kent, discharging live rounds from a Glock 17, your inner ear does not miss a thing. You feel every shot being fired in your nerve ends. You can hear everything. You can hear the blood in your veins.

  Despite the ear and eye protection that we all wore inside our booths, insulating every shooter into his or her own little world, a world that narrows down to you and your gun and your target, and despite every effort to muffle the murderous racket with high, thick panels that divide the shooters, every shot fired seemed to find its own echo somewhere in the back of my brain.

  The eye protection that I wore to protect me from flying fragments of spent brass steamed up every few minutes with a fine film of mist. Again and again, I had to – very carefully – place the Glock 17 on the counter before me and swab off the foggy lenses before I picked up the gun and aimed again at the target twenty-five metres away.

  ‘It’s amazing how many gun club civilians shoot at a target that is way over twenty-five metres away,’ Jackson said, having to raise his voice above the muffle of the headphones. ‘You try explaining in a court of law how you shot someone in self-defence who was twenty-five metres away. Good luck with that. This distance is good practice for your hand and eye. But if you want real world, then bring the target in to ten metres or less. That’s where they are going to be when you want to make them think again.’

  I had heard many shots fired in anger. But that was always sporadic firing that seemed to come out of nowhere, and although it cracked open the very air, it was over before your mind had a chance to register what had just happened. This was different. This was a universe of gunfire. And as I learned to rack the slide back to check the firearm was unloaded, as I learned to load the magazine, and to grip the gun, and to keep my finger off the trigger until I was ready to shoot, I also had to learn to control my heart.

  Jackson was having a wonderful time.

  We had always been as competitive as brothers, and as he stood with me in the firing booth, his hands sometimes running over the stubby black Glock like a virtuoso tuning an instrument for a novice student – showing me the correct technique for loading or dropping a magazine, demonstrating his steady and unwavering grip, telling me how to pass him a loaded Glock without pointing it at his head – through the nerve-jangling mist that steamed up my eyewear, I saw him smiling with gappy-toothed delight.

  ‘Centre of mass,’ he said. ‘Think about that, Max. We are training to shoot at the largest part of the body – the torso. We are not learning to kill here. We are learning how to hit our target.’

  I spent an hour emptying the Glock at paper targets – a bullseye on a black-and-white image of an armed man’s torso. But the actual act of shooting was a tiny part of the lesson, seconds of murderous noise between the longer minutes of learning how to handle my firearm. Jackson talked me through the grind of manually loading the Glock, pushing the full-metal jacket cartridges into the magazine, the rear of the bullet towards the back of the gun, the act becoming physically harder as you loaded more bullets, as if warning of the seriousness of this enterprise.

  ‘There’s a speed clip for loading but you should know how to do it yourself,’ said my teacher.

  Jackson was a patient and good teacher, completely comfortable with a loaded gun in his hands, and always alert when that loaded gun was in mine.

  After an hour I left him to it – his aim steady, his demeanour calm as gunfire carved a large black hole in the centre of a target – and I went off to the locker room, sticky with nervous sweat and looking forward to a shower.

  The Gravesend training centre was huge, like an abandoned small town, or a large film set. There were make-believe streets with shops, pubs and houses, the carriage of a tube train and the fuselage of a plane.

  The live-fire ranges included areas for shotguns, rifles and handguns, like the one where I had left Jackson. The crack and pop of live ammunition filled the air as officers made their way to lecture rooms.

  Everywhere teemed with life and action and noise.

  But the locker room was silent and empty apart from Ray Vann.

  He gave me a tired smile when I walked in. He looked as though he had not slept since the day we went into Borodino Street. I sat down on the bench beside him, remembering Alice Stone singling him out in the jump-off van on the day that she died.
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br />   You OK, Raymond?

  ‘You’ve been shooting with Jackson?’ he said.

  ‘He’s trying to teach me,’ I said. ‘But it’s hard. I can’t imagine what it’s like in a live situation. Someone shooting back at you, lousy visibility, your blood pressure off the scale.’

  He gave me a rueful smile.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s even harder.’

  We sat in silence.

  ‘The IPCC interviewed me about Borodino Street,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘I wish I could help you more, Ray. But there’s no more I can do.’

  I’m not going to rat him out, I thought.

  But I am not going to lie for him.

  ‘I appreciate what you’ve done,’ he said, not looking at me. Eye contact seemed difficult for him. Today and every day. ‘You’ve done enough for me, Max.’

  He said it without any bitterness or sarcasm.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I said.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, when it was anything but fine. ‘Jackson told you, I guess – me and him, we were both temporarily suspended because we discharged our weapons. We were both boarded.’

  Boarding meant they had gone before an interview board of senior officers on the top floor of New Scotland Yard to justify their actions.

  ‘But Jackson is going back on active duty. There’s even talk of him getting the QPM.’

  The Queen’s Police Medal is awarded to serving police officers for gallantry or distinguished service.

  ‘And I’m not getting a medal,’ Ray Vann said. ‘But I might get jail time for unlawful killing.’

  ‘Ray,’ I said, with more conviction than I felt. ‘That’s not going to happen. They’re not going to do you for unlawful killing. Adnan Khan was a mass murderer. He was a stone-cold killer. He was a terrorist. Adnan and his brother brought down that helicopter over Lake Meadows. His brother murdered Alice Stone. Adnan Khan was not an innocent man.’

  ‘I’ve been removed from operational duty,’ he said, not hearing me, or perhaps unable to believe me. ‘There’s evidence of unlawful conduct, see, in the trajectory of the GSW.’

  Gunshot wound.

  ‘You see, Max, they don’t quite buy my line that he was going for a weapon – or maybe those hand grenades that we heard so much about.’ He stared at the floor. ‘The IPCC have put it to me that I shot Adnan Khan when he was on his knees and attempting to surrender himself to my custody,’ he said. ‘And even if I don’t get done for unlawful killing, there’s talk that this big shot human rights lawyer –the one with all the silver hair? – will bring a civil case against me if the IPCC decide that it was a lawful killing. And then there’s the DPS.’

  The Department of Professional Standards – the internal police complaints unit that investigates all police shootings.

  ‘So – whatever happens – I am going to get whatever they decide to give to me.’ And now he finally looked me in the eye. ‘They’re not going to let me walk away from it, Max.’

  He was a decent man. I wished there was more that I could do for him.

  ‘You served in Afghanistan, didn’t you, Ray?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know Jackson when you were out there?’

  He smiled his shy smile.

  ‘I was regular army. Jackson was something else. Something more. Jackson was playing with the big boys.’

  He looked at me to see how much I knew.

  ‘I know Jackson was Special Forces,’ I said. ‘But I bet it was hard enough in the regular army.’

  ‘We don’t talk about it,’ he laughed. ‘Because we wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  He stared at me until he believed that I really wanted to know. Then he took a breath and tried his best.

  ‘Twice a day we went on patrol and I had mates – too many mates – who had their legs and balls blown off by IEDs. Then, when the twice-a-day patrol was over, we went home to a camp with no running water, and no refrigerator, and no roof – all the better for the Taliban to lob in grenades. Our superior officers didn’t visit us because it was too dangerous. And then we would go out on another patrol and the legs and the bits of bodies that our mates – living and dead – had left behind would be tied to trees. And the Taliban knew that we left nobody behind, living or dead, so they would booby-trap the bodies – and the bits and pieces – of dead men. Very young, they were. Very young dead men, Max, their body parts up there in the trees. It was worse for the boys they took prisoner, of course. Castration. Scalping. Skinning alive. The usual Afghan hospitality.’

  I looked away because the tears had started and his face was contorting with fierce effort as he tried to stop them. There was a choking sound in his throat that was not from emotion but his struggle to control emotion.

  When the terrible sound had stopped I looked back at him and he was dry-eyed now and smiling at me in that gentle, diffident manner he had.

  And finally I understood exactly why, just before we went into Borodino Street, Alice Stone had asked him how he was doing.

  It was still just the two of us in that locker room.

  I leaned closer to him.

  ‘What happened in that basement, Ray?’ I said.

  ‘They brought the war home, Max,’ he said. ‘And so did we.’

  14

  The next day the bulldozers and the skips went in to Borodino Street before first light and behind them a parameter was set up to keep members of the public a mile away from the clean-up operation. Early rising residents were free to come and go but when the first members of the public started arriving, they were politely stopped at the perimeter by uniformed officers and gently relieved of their flowers.

  Borodino Street was cleared of flowers with as much respect and dignity as we could muster. Our press office released a statement saying that dying flowers would be used as fertiliser while fresh bouquets would be donated to local hospitals. Condolence cards, poems and letters were all carefully collected for the bereaved family of Alice Stone, should they wish to see them, while teddy bears and other toys would be donated to children’s charities.

  But it was over.

  In the roads surrounding Borodino Street, white vans full of police in riot gear waited for crowd trouble that never came. Their mood was joyful, almost euphoric, coppers who were happy and relieved to learn that they were not going to have anything thrown at their heads in the next few hours. Always a good feeling.

  Members of the public were still arriving to pay their respects, and to lay their flowers, and to witness the great festival of mourning, but they did not protest or seem surprised when they were denied access to Borodino Street, and they were grateful when their flowers were taken from them by young uniformed policemen and women with real and unforced tenderness.

  There were no photographers around when the bulldozers were filling the skips with their loads of rotting bouquets. By the time the sun was over the rooftops, the first convoy of lorries was already driving away, the battered yellow skips piled high with dead flowers, acres of cellophane flashing in the sunshine. Wary residents woke up and peered from their windows, as if not quite believing what they were seeing. Borodino Street was returning to something approaching normal.

  The Met are good at this kind of thing. From Princess Diana to suddenly dead rock and pop stars, we have had a lot of practice. But there comes a point where a city street has to stop being a shrine.

  ‘How can anyone live here now?’ Edie said. ‘This is no place for a teenage girl to be growing.’

  We were standing outside the Khan family home. The place was a ruin. The search teams had torn up the floorboards, ripped open the walls and collapsed the ceilings, dumping the debris in the front garden.

  ‘You saved Layla from care,’ I said. ‘But you can’t save her from her home.’

  I suggested we get some breakfast inside us. It was going to be a long day.

  Because in the after
noon they were burying Alice Stone.

  The police had their own wake that evening.

  The Fighting Temeraire is an old-fashioned pub round the back of Victoria, close enough to New Scotland Yard to be annexed by the Met for important occasions.

  When I arrived with Edie and Joy at just after six the place was already heaving. One hundred hungry, beer-bleary eyes turned on the two women.

  ‘Or I might just go home,’ Adams said.

  Edie laughed and took her by the hand.

  ‘We’re not scared of this lot,’ she said. ‘Come on.’ They pushed their way into the mob and were lost to me.

  The Fighting Temeraire is one of those pubs that prides itself on being untouched by the modern world. There was no music, no dining area, no frills, although it does have giant TV screens for sport.

  But tonight they were not showing any sport.

  The entire pub looked up as they showed a clip from Alice Stone’s funeral, the same clip that they had been showing at every news bulletin for the last few hours.

  Alice’s husband was standing by his wife’s coffin, his face a map of a man enduring the unendurable, one small child in his arms and the other holding his hand, the mourners behind them totally silent. Then the clip was gone and the noise level rose. I saw Edie and Joy at the bar. Two young DIs from New Scotland Yard were on either side of them, trying their luck. And I saw that Edie was not interested in this man and, all at once, I understood that TDC Joy Adams was not interested in any man, not in that way.

  Edie caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back.

  And then a shoulder slammed into me.

  I stared into the face of the pale young man with the wispy beard who had carried a shotgun he never used to Borodino Street. I was about to apologise. Then I saw Jesse Tibbs didn’t want my apology.

  ‘You’ve been sucking up to the IPCC,’ he said. ‘You grassed on Ray Vann. If he goes down for unlawful killing, I will make you crawl, Wolfe.’

  I turned to his friends, a silent invitation to intervene before it was too late.

  ‘Leave it, Jesse,’ one of them said without much enthusiasm. And that was it. They were letting him off his leash.