Girl On Fire_DC Max Wolfe

by Tony Parsons

  ‘I don’t suck up to anyone,’ I told Tibbs. ‘Why don’t you go and have another drink? Not that you need one.’

  I made to move past him but he put his free hand on my chest. The other hand held a beer bottle by the neck.

  ‘I heard your mob has been babysitting that murdering Paki bastard,’ he said.

  I stared at his friends again but they were not going to do me any favours here.

  Then Ray Vann was there, staring at me as if we had never met.

  I thought I recognised some of the others from the jump-off van but it was difficult to tell now they were not in PASGT helmets and Kevlar.

  ‘Ahmed Khan didn’t murder anyone,’ I said deliberately.

  ‘Come on, Jesse, have a drink,’ said one of his companions. They eyeballed me evenly. It did not feel like we were on the same side tonight.

  Tibbs’ gaze slid away from me as his mouth twisted with fury.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, getting his attention again. ‘Did you hear me, pal? That old man didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t kill the people who died when the helicopter came down and he didn’t kill Alice Stone. So don’t waste your feelings on him. Save it for someone who deserves it.’

  Tibbs’ friends were putting their hands on him.

  He furiously shrugged them off.

  He tapped his beer bottle against my chest.

  ‘I’m warning you,’ he slurred, and I suddenly saw just how drunk he was. ‘You tell me where that safe house is – you tell me where West End Central are babysitting this scumbag – because I’m going round there tonight …’

  ‘Tibbs,’ Jackson said, appearing by his side. ‘Jesse. Shut it.’

  ‘Why do you always have to watch his back?’ Tibbs demanded.

  I shook my head. ‘Why do you hate that old man?’

  ‘Are you fucking shitting me?’ Tibbs screamed. ‘Because he raised those evil bastards! Why do you give a toss about him?’

  ‘Because he’s an innocent man.’

  ‘Innocent? You really believe that?’

  ‘His sons were poison. He drives buses.’

  I pushed past him. His friends half-heartedly tried to restrain him but Tibbs came after me, shouting abuse.

  I was not going to do anything unless he put his hands on me.

  And that was what he did, his palms slick with sweat and lager on my shoulders, one of them still holding that bottle as he pulled at my T-shirt.

  And that was all a bit silly.

  He should have just hit me from behind with his bottle.

  With his hands on my shoulders, Tibbs was wide open. I half-turned and hit him with a short left hook to the ribcage and he sank down on one knee like someone who had never felt a body shot before.

  A wave of sickness and sadness washed over me.

  I did not want to fight this man but I knew I might not have a choice. I waited to see if he wanted to take it further.

  But he just rubbed his aching ribs as he slowly got to his feet.

  ‘Next time,’ he said.

  ‘Next time you better bring your gun,’ I said.

  I walked back to West End Central.

  There were tourists at the end of Savile Row, photographing the outside of number 3, where the Beatles played their last ever gig on the rooftop in 1969, grinning and making peace signs and excited at the proximity of the ghosts of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

  I watched one of the tourists pay their rickshaw driver.

  George Halfpenny thanked them in Mandarin.

  ‘I heard that you closed down Borodino Street,’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘We opened it up,’ I said. ‘We opened it up for the people who live there. Your adoring fans are going to have to catch you at some other venue.’

  ‘I don’t have fans. Just some people who listen to what I have to say. Why does that bother you so much?’

  ‘I’m afraid some of them haven’t read as many books as you have, George.’ I indicated his rickshaw. ‘Are you free?’

  ‘Are you making fun of me?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked at the Chinese tourists.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Bar Italia,’ I said. ‘It’s on Frith Street.’

  ‘I know where the Bar Italia is,’ he said.

  I eased myself into the back of his rickshaw.

  George Halfpenny stood up on his bike and put some beef into it, transporting me to Soho with real professional pride, as if he wanted to show me that he was far more than a rickshaw driver, far more than a coolie for tourists, as if he wanted to prove that his muscle and sinew and animal strength had been built up over the course of a thousand years.

  15

  It was still early on Sunday morning when Stan and I strolled across Victoria Park, the time when there was nobody around apart from the serious runners and the dog walkers who rose at the same time whatever the season. Stan sniffed the air with interest, but there was a hint of suspicion in his huge round eyes. These were not the scents of his usual Sunday walk on Hampstead Heath.

  It was a short walk from Victoria Park to Borodino Street where a few stray petals were the only reminder of the sea of flowers that had been laid for Alice Stone. But there were no crowds, no reporters, no photographers and no police. Perhaps the press was all waiting at the bus station where Ahmed Khan was going to work the Sunday shift. Yes, that was the money shot for the morning news.

  Stan and I walked the length of that small road, my dog delicately sniffing every lamppost and garden gate before cocking his rear right leg and leaving his mark. He still had one leg cocked in the air when Ahmed Khan came out of his house wearing his London Transport bus driver’s uniform and carrying a lunch box. His wife, Azza, and granddaughter, Layla, stared at me over his shoulder.

  Mrs Khan tugged at her hijab, gave Layla a push backwards and shut the door behind him without a word.

  ‘Morning, Arnold,’ I said.

  ‘They make you do this?’ he said. ‘They make you watch over me?’

  I indicated Stan. ‘Does he look like a police dog to you? It’s my day off. I’m just checking in on you. Seeing how you’re doing.’

  In truth there was a part of me that had not believed that he would leave the safe house and return home. I did not believe that anyone would so blithely ignore an Osman warning. I did not believe that anyone could be that stubborn, stupid and brave.

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ he said.

  A police car turned into the street. It slowly passed us, two faces turned towards us without expression, one white and one black, bleary with lack of sleep, clearly at the tail end of the night shift, and then accelerated away.

  ‘They come every few hours,’ he said. ‘Just drive past and do not stop.’

  ‘I’m surprised they come as often as that,’ I said. ‘Is it good to be home?’

  He gestured at the little front garden. The torn plaster, piles of brickwork and ripped-out floorboards.

  ‘They have destroyed my home,’ he said.

  I felt something harden in me. ‘Blame your sons,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t blame anyone.’

  We stared at each other in silence.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he said.

  ‘I was going to drive you to work. Victoria Bus Station, right?’

  ‘Don’t you have a family that needs you on a Sunday?’

  ‘I have a seven-year-old daughter. But she’s a very popular little girl. She gets invited to lots of parties and social events. She’s doing her own thing. I’m just here to provide a taxi service.’

  There had been a sleepover with Scout’s Australian friend Mia last night and today Mia’s mum was taking the pair of them to an eighth birthday party at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead. I found that I was smiling with pride that my daughter was in such demand.

  ‘Come on, Arnold,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive you to work. My car’s parked just by Victoria Park.’

  He shook his head. />
  ‘I don’t need a lift,’ he said. ‘I will get the tube. Thank you – I know you are trying to be kind. But I just want life to go back to normal.’ He hesitated, as if understanding that was asking a lot. ‘My colleagues at work – I want to see them. I told you before – I had to win their acceptance when I first came to this country.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I remember. Working on all the days when they did not want to work,’ I said. ‘Working at Christmas. Working on Sundays.’

  ‘And in the end they accepted me. All right, Arnold, mate? They called me mate. They called me Arnold. And now I know I have to win their acceptance again.’

  ‘You might have to work a bit harder this time.’

  ‘I know.’ He hung his head. ‘After everything that has happened on this street. After all the misery and death caused by my sons. But that is them, not me. I have to show my colleagues that I am still the same man.’

  I said nothing. It seemed unlikely that he would win hearts and minds by driving the number 73 from Victoria Bus Station to Stoke Newington Common. But what else could he do?

  I saw his hands shaking on his Tupperware lunch box.

  ‘The alternative is to hide in shame and fear,’ he said, answering my question.

  He didn’t want me watching his back. He didn’t want a lift to work. He simply wanted to return to a life that I knew – and perhaps he did too – had gone forever.

  So Stan and I walked with him to the tube station.

  He paused at the ticket barrier with his Oyster card in his hand.

  ‘Why are you trying to help me?’ he said, his eyes sliding away and then finally meeting mine.

  ‘Because you don’t deserve to die,’ I said.

  And then Ahmed Khan went to work.

  Early in the afternoon I waited for Scout outside the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, checking the progress of Ahmed Khan’s bus on the news.

  The press had been waiting for him at Victoria Bus Station and his return to work was the lead item on the news for most of the morning. But by the time Stan and I were waiting for Scout to come out of a private birthday girl screening of My Neighbour Totoro, the interest in Ahmed Khan’s return to work had started to wane.

  The number 73 is one of the great London bus routes, crossing a vast swathe of the city from west to north and taking in some of the main attractions – Hyde Park, Park Lane, Marble Arch, Oxford Street, the British Library – before veering north at King’s Cross for Angel, Islington and beyond, ending its journey at Stoke Newington and then making the trip back across town.

  When Ahmed Khan left Victoria Bus Station he was carrying a busload of reporters and photographers. They took their pictures of the slight, serious, painfully thin man settling himself at the wheel of the big red bus, and he could do nothing to prevent that, but when they barked their questions, he resolutely failed to reply.

  When I looked at the news on my phone as I waited for Scout, Ahmed Khan was halfway through his Sunday shift. Already the reporters were drifting off, called away by deadlines and a man who, they saw, just wanted to be left alone to do his job.

  There were no incidents with members of the public.

  Scout came out of the cinema with Mia, breathless with excitement.

  ‘Can I go rowing on the Thames? Can I do that? Is it all right? Is it? I want to do the rowing thing, Daddy.’

  Mia’s mother confirmed the invitation. The family lived in Pimlico, down by the river, and these sunny, summer Sunday afternoons were spent on the water. So Stan and I found a dog-friendly café – Hampstead was full of them – and he settled at my feet to nibble happily on pieces of toasted buttered bagel.

  My ex-wife called just as I was paying the bill.

  And I stared at her incoming call, deciding if I should answer it or not, wondering what fleeting fancy it was this time, what new disruption to our daughter’s settled life she was planning, and how much more I should take before calling an end to it forever.

  Scout was a happy child but it was a happiness that had been hard-won, as happiness is always hard-won for the children of divorced parents.

  But I answered Anne’s call, reflecting that maybe I should have deleted her number by now.

  There was silence, and the sound of a child in the background, echoes from another life in a different home. And then finally my ex-wife spoke.

  ‘I think Scout should live with me now,’ she said.

  I waited at the tube station for Ahmed Khan, a knot of sick dread in the pit of my stomach. It was early evening now and the heat of the day had built into something oppressive, the dust and fumes of the fag end of the hot weekend in the city wiping away the memory of that crisp clean early Sunday morning.

  I heard the screams before I saw him.

  The men and women in their summer clothes came before him like heralds, running from the tube station, faces aghast with disbelieving horror. They leapt the ticket barrier and shoved past the ticket collector as if they were fleeing a fire.

  And then I saw him.

  Ahmed Khan staggered towards the ticket barrier.

  A space had opened up around him, as if what ailed him was contagious, as if he was diseased, as if he brought death with him.

  His face looked bewildered.

  This is how it ends?

  The knife had been plunged into the base of his neck where it met his left shoulder blade. It is exactly the point where the subclavian artery pumps blood to the arms and neck. The subclavian is a large artery, difficult to miss if you know what you are aiming at. You cut it when you want to kill. An arterial spurt of blood had drenched Ahmed Khan’s left arm and the front of his bus driver’s uniform.

  And as I reached him, I saw the knife itself.

  The blade was buried two inches into his body, but I could still read the inscription on the blade. Blut und Ehre, it said. I saw the nickel-plated pommel, and the grip of black Bakelite with the gold-etched black swastika on a red-and-white diamond.

  He opened his mouth to speak and a thick bubble of black blood escaped his throat.

  ‘Layla,’ he gasped. ‘Who will take care of Layla?’

  Then he collapsed into my arms and we sank to the ground together, holding each other. I could hear the sirens coming for him above the screams.

  They were there in five minutes.

  But Ahmed Khan was dead in my arms before then.

  It was TDC Joy Adams who saw the graffiti.

  The tube station was a murder scene now. The CSIs were all over it. The Divisional Surgeon had pronounced Ahmed Khan dead and the mortuary van had taken his body away. I covered my blood-stained T-shirt with a fleece I got from one of the local coppers. By the time Edie and Joy arrived there was nothing to do but notify his next of kin. The three of us walked to Borodino Street.

  I rang the doorbell and Layla answered, the fear already on her face. It is always the same when someone opens the door and police are standing there. They look at you and they are afraid. And they are right to be afraid. The news we bring is never good.

  ‘Is your grandmother home?’ I said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, and I was struck by how different she sounded to her grandparents. All I heard in her voice was the accent of the East End, all I heard was the sound of someone who knew no other home. ‘I heard the sirens. Is it my Papa-Papa?’

  ‘Please, Layla,’ Edie said gently, her face white with concern, her hands resting on the girl’s arms. ‘Get your grandmother for us.’

  Joy Adams had remained on the street. She was staring at debris in the tiny front garden.

  ‘You need to see this, Max,’ she called to me.

  One of the floorboards had been propped on its side and separated from the rest. There were numbers, five of them, written with some kind of thick black magic marker, carefully etched into the ruined wood. Next to the ramshackle pile, this floorboard looked posed, as if the world needed to see this message. Had I seen those numbers this morning when I met Ahm
ed Khan as he left for work? Were they there already? Had I stared straight through them?

  ‘You see it?’ Joy said.

  20:8–11

  ‘What is that?’ I said.

  Edie Wren, of London-Irish Catholic stock, joined us as Layla went to fetch her grandmother. She looked from the numbers to Joy.

  ‘It’s a chapter and verse from the Bible, isn’t it?’ Edie said. ‘What book is that from?’

  ‘It’s from Exodus,’ Joy said without hesitation. ‘The second book of Moses. Chapter twenty, verses eight to eleven.’ She looked at me. ‘It’s the Fourth Commandment.’

  ‘And what’s the Fourth Commandment?’ I asked her.

  ‘Remember the Sabbath day,’ Joy said. She didn’t even have to google it. ‘And keep it holy.’

  From inside the house on Borodino Street, a woman began to scream.

  16

  My ex-wife still turned heads.

  And as Anne walked into the Fleet Street café first thing Monday morning, her husband a faithful half-step behind her, I saw that she would always turn heads.

  When we had been together, there had been many furious scenes because some photographer or stylist thought that she was too old, or too fat, or too lacking in some flavour of the month to grace their glossy pages. But what did they know about real beauty? Hers was the kind of beauty that would never fade. Heads turned now, as they would in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time.

  Her husband – Oliver, I thought, the guy is almost certainly called Oliver – attempted a smile at me. How many times had I seen him in my life? A handful. And I had never seen him dressed for work before. I recognised the Savile Row tailor that had made his lightweight summer suit because I had often stared in their window on my way to West End Central. I saw where their money came from. I saw why, once our little family had started falling apart, I could never compete. Anne had been looking for a life that her fading modelling career and a husband who was a young uniformed cop could never provide.

  ‘This is why Scout is going to live with us, Max,’ she said, sitting down. ‘Because a child should be with her mother. Because we can provide a better life for her. And because it is what Scout wants.’