Girl On Fire_DC Max Wolfe

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Cause of death was a single wound to the subclavian artery, which as you know is the artery that pumps blood to the arms and neck. If an artery of that size is torn then it’s possible that it can contract and stem the bleeding. But a clean cut of the subclavian artery with a blade that has a razor-sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges will kill you in, oh, five minutes.’

  The old scar on my stomach throbbed with pain that may have been psychosomatic but felt real enough to me.

  ‘I understand you recovered a newly sharpened 26.6-centimetre knife from the crime scene,’ Elsa said. ‘That would do the job.’

  ‘The fact that it was sticking out of his neck gave us a clue,’ Edie said.

  Whitestone shot her a withering look, then turned to me.

  ‘Someone knew what they were doing,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe they just got lucky,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Whitestone said. ‘They knew exactly what they were doing. You don’t stick a knife in the subclavian artery by accident. Someone wanted him dead.’

  ‘Time of death you know because he died in your arms, Max,’ Elsa went on. She stared thoughtfully at Ahmed Khan and then, almost as an afterthought. ‘Manner of death was murder,’ she said.

  But there were other, ancient scars on Ahmed Khan’s body. What looked like a shallow stab wound on his arm. The mottled scarring of broken glass on his shoulder. Dark tissue on his arms where bones had been broken and never properly healed.

  ‘He had a lot of old scars,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Elsa said. ‘When did Mr Khan come to this country from Pakistan?’

  ‘I believe it was the Seventies,’ I said.

  Elsa nodded.

  ‘Souvenirs of a hard life,’ she said.

  It was a short walk from the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road to West End Central at 27 Savile Row. We cut across St James’s Park, glorious in the summer sunshine.

  TDC Joy Adams was alone in MIR-1.

  She looked apologetic.

  ‘I don’t know if this is anything,’ she said.

  ‘Show me,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘It might be nothing,’ she said. ‘Just social media drivel.’

  Whitestone stared at her hard and Joy Adams stopped apologising.

  ‘I found something on Tubecrush,’ she said.

  We gathered around her workstation as she scrolled through dozens of images of young men, riding the London underground but dressed for the beach.

  ‘Look,’ Adams said.

  The young man wore cargo shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. He was turned away from the camera but you could see the strength in his body. The broad back, the pumped-up arms, the thick muscles of the legs. His hair was totally shaved at the side and back, but grew out in a tufty crop on top of his head. In the background, in a half-empty carriage, most of his fellow passengers stared at their phones.

  But one man slept.

  He wore the uniform of a London bus driver.

  It was Ahmed Khan, going home, exhausted by the heat, worn out by the day, on a journey to the home that he would never reach.

  ‘Good work, Joy,’ Whitestone said. ‘This places Ahmed Khan and George Halfpenny in the same tube carriage just before he was murdered.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Are we sure? The sleeping man is Ahmed Khan, all right. But the young guy with his back to the camera? I don’t know if that’s George Halfpenny or some kid with the same haircut. A lot of people have got a haircut like that this summer. Edie?’

  ‘I don’t know, Max. It could be him.’

  ‘It fits,’ Whitestone said. ‘Ahmed Khan ran for his life when he saw George Halfpenny following him. Why? Because Khan had seen him on TV. And he knew how much he was hated.’

  ‘Five million journeys on the underground every day,’ I said. ‘On five hundred trains. And we are going to arrest someone for murder because of a haircut?’

  But Whitestone had made up her mind.

  And I saw how much she wanted it to be true.

  21

  ‘I lie belly-up in the sunshine, happier than you will ever be,’ I read. ‘Today I sniffed many dog butts – I celebrate by kissing your face.’

  Scout sat up in bed, smoothing down her duvet and smiling secretly to herself as I read. She liked this one.

  ‘Another dog poem,’ she observed.

  ‘I sound the alarm!

  Paperboy – come to kill us all –

  Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!

  I sound the alarm!

  Garbage man – come to kill us all –

  Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!’

  She watched Stan, asleep at her feet, as if he might possibly enjoy a poem about a dog. And of course I watched her. My daughter at seven – pink-faced from her bath, her hair smelling of shampoo, sitting up straight for the ritual of the bedtime read.

  ‘Look in my eyes and deny it,’ I read.

  Scout grinned at me, waiting for the punchline.

  I closed the book and recited the last line from memory.

  ‘No human could love you as much as I do.’

  ‘Who wrote that one, Daddy?’

  ‘That’s by Anonymous, angel.’

  ‘He’s written some good stuff,’ Scout said. ‘Old Anonymous.’

  I kissed the top of her head and took Stan with me when I turned out the light. Scout’s eyes were already closing as she snuggled down. But I knew that sleep would not come that easily for me tonight.

  I spread an exercise mat on the floor of the living room and cranked out one hundred press-ups and then one hundred sit-ups in four sets of twenty-five. But although my body was weary my head was still full. I was nowhere near sleep. So I went to one of the big windows of the loft and watched the men at the meat market and the young dancers filing happily into Fabric.

  As the time drifted past midnight, and the moon crossed the sky behind the great gleaming dome of St Paul’s, the streets below our window seemed to get busier. Smithfield is the insomniac’s neighbourhood.

  The summer night passed slowly. In the small hours, I lay on my bed for a while but my head was still too full for sleep. So I got up, showered and shaved, and brewed a pot of black coffee. At 4 a.m. sharp Mrs Murphy arrived, bleary from sleep, shivering in the chill of the hour before dawn.

  ‘You’ll want your coat on out there,’ she told me.

  I nodded, and checked in on my sleeping daughter and stroked my snoring dog.

  And then I went to work.

  The sun would be up at 5 a.m. but it was still pitch-dark when I arrived at the car park of West End Central. The place was already buzzing. Whitestone, in a Kevlar jacket and a PASGT helmet, was briefing a couple of uniformed coppers.

  Jackson Rose was standing at the back of a jump-off van, talking quietly to his SFOs.

  And a team of paramedics stood in the open doors of an ambulance gulping down coffee they probably didn’t need.

  Every face in that car park was pulled tight with adrenaline.

  Jackson’s shots didn’t look like police officers at all. With their PASGT helmets, rubber goggles, body armour on knees and elbows and Heckler & Koch assault rifles, they looked like a private army from the next century. Jesse Tibbs shrugged his shoulders, hefted his Benelli 12-gauge shotgun and stared straight through me.

  I walked over to Whitestone and her uniforms. They were young, a man and a woman, the man dark and bearded and smiling, the woman younger, stout and dead serious. SYKES, it said on the man’s name badge. THOMPSON, it said on the woman’s.

  ‘We’re looking for shoes,’ Whitestone told them. ‘If you can find bloodstained clothes, then that’s even better. But Halfpenny is likely to have burned or dumped any bloodstained T-shirt or jeans. Because they always do. There would have been a lot of blood on his clothes. You don’t get out of the way of an arterial spray. He’s a lot less likely to have dumped any trainers he was wearing. He’s almost certainly not that smart. Because they never are.’

  Edi
e Wren and Joy Adams, already kitted up, came into the car park. Edie handed me a Kevlar jacket, PASGT helmet and a triple espresso from the Bar Italia.

  ‘Do we really need the heavy mob?’ I said, indicating the shots and the paramedics.

  ‘Well,’ Edie said. ‘Let’s hope not.’

  My telephone vibrated. NO CALLER ID, it said. And then the message.

  I will make you crawl

  As I slid my phone back in my pocket, I looked across at Jesse Tibbs, remembering his threat to me in The Fighting Temeraire on the day they buried Alice Stone.

  He was staring at his phone, scratching his wispy blond beard with his free hand, before he looked up and gave Jackson his full attention. Tibbs shrugged again, a nervous tic that lifted up the weight of his protective gear and weapons.

  It was an unusual threat, I reflected.

  People threaten to kill you. People threaten to smash your face in. And they do that all the time, if their blood is up.

  But I had never had anyone promise to make me crawl.

  I kept looking at Tibbs. He kept staring at Jackson.

  Then Whitestone was by my side.

  ‘Ready?’ she said.

  And as the first rumour of sunlight crept above the rooftops of the city, we went to arrest a man for murder.

  The Halfpenny brothers lived above a shuttered pet shop in Camden Town.

  There was a ragged FOR SALE sign above the shop. It looked as though it had been on sale for a while. And it looked as though it had been even longer since they sold any pets here. TALKING PARROTS, it said above the shop. TRAINED CHIMPS.

  There was a locked metal gate at the foot of the stairs to the flats above the shops. There was some quiet cursing from our mob. Apparently nobody was expecting it to be there, so we crouched down behind recycling bins as Whitestone and Jackson quickly conferred. Some foggy-eyed refugees from the vibrant Camden nightlife were still rolling home and they gawped and leered to see us crouching behind the bins. Then Whitestone and Jackson turned to look at them, Jackson’s Heckler & Koch twitching at that 45-degree angle, and the drunks briskly moved on.

  Jackson nodded to his team and Tibbs moved forward, lifting his Benelli shotgun to his shoulder, pointing it at the lock on the gate.

  I slowed my breathing, telling myself that there was nothing much waiting for us at the top of the stairs, and nothing much behind the next locked door we would go through. But the truth is that you never know, and you can never possibly know, and it is this great unknown that winds you up tight and makes you pray that this is not the day you die.

  For one long moment time seemed to freeze.

  I looked at the SFOs huddled around Jackson, and I looked at Edie and Joy, and at the two uniformed officers, Sykes and Thompson. And I looked at Whitestone. The sunlight of the new day glittered on her glasses. Then she nodded.

  ‘Go,’ Jackson said quietly, and Tibbs fired his shotgun at the big lock on the gate.

  The Hatton round took it off as if it was nothing.

  Then we were running up the stairs in single file, the sound of the shotgun still ringing in my ears, Jackson and his team of SFOs leading the way, pausing outside the first flat. In one smooth movement Tibbs aimed his shotgun and blew the front door wide open.

  Jackson’s team poured inside with weapons raised to their shoulders and screaming their warning, the shouts that are there to terrify them and embolden us.

  ‘Armed police! Armed police!’

  The flat was tiny.

  We fell out of the hall into a box-shaped living room where a teenage boy in a wheelchair was asleep in front of an elderly television set. There was a small coffee table piled high with library books about military history. A. J. P. Taylor and Antony Beevor and Max Hastings. Fat books by thoughtful men on the great wars of the last century.

  The boy in the wheelchair came awake with a jolt and gasped with shock at the men with guns. He wore only a T-shirt and boxer shorts. His legs were withered and twisted.

  I looked at Whitestone and I saw she was thinking the same thing.

  Wrong flat.

  It would not have been the first time.

  But the boy in the wheelchair had his hair cut in the brutal fashion of that summer, shaved close at the back and side and grown out on top, and there was something about him, the gaunt face that could have come from a photograph of the Depression, that made me realise there were not two Halfpenny brothers.

  There were three.

  And then George Halfpenny was stumbling into the room in T-shirt and boxer shorts, his gaunt face blurry with sleep, and his brother Richard was behind him, wearing only his briefs, and looking like an overdeveloped strong man in one of those old ads about not getting sand kicked in your face when you go to the beach. Only their haircuts were the same. They stood there staring at the men who had entered their home and at the assault rifles that were pointing at their chests. The boy in the wheelchair was between us.

  ‘Armed police!’

  ‘Raise your hands!’

  ‘On your knees! Now! Do it!’

  The brothers did not move.

  Jesse Tibbs took George Halfpenny by the scruff of his neck and forced him to his knees. Richard followed suit without being prompted. The boy in the wheelchair began to cry.

  ‘Edward,’ George Halfpenny said to him. ‘Please don’t cry.’

  George, Richard and Edward, I thought.

  Poor boys named after kings.

  ‘Tell them you didn’t do it!’ the boy in the wheelchair – Edward Halfpenny – shouted at his brother, his mouth twisted with effort, the words sounding as though they were coming from underwater. ‘Tell them you didn’t kill anyone!’

  ‘George Halfpenny,’ Whitestone said. ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Ahmed Khan.’

  The two uniformed police officers, Sykes and Thompson, approached the boy in the wheelchair. Thompson crouched down beside him, trying to calm him down, while Sykes placed his hands on the back of the wheelchair, ready to move him from danger.

  And that is when George Halfpenny went berserk.

  He was on his feet and coming forward, throwing wild punches at Sykes. One of them connected with the point of Sykes’ chin and the young officer went down hard, cracking his temple on the side of the coffee table before he hit the worn-out carpet.

  There was a sickening fraction of a second when we all stared at Sykes. The officer was not moving. A tiny sliver of blood pulsed from a vein on his forehead.

  Then someone was screaming into their radio for medics.

  They were there almost immediately.

  Jackson stepped forward and almost casually bounced the butt of his Sig Sauer assault rifle off George Halfpenny’s forehead and hands grabbed him as he sagged to the floor.

  He was dragged away.

  ‘Tell them! Tell them!’ Edward shouted at his remaining brother, his thin arms and wasted legs writhing with anguish.

  Richard Halfpenny was still on his knees with his hands in the air, a powerful young man whose strength had been confiscated. He cast an anxious look at the door. He was lost without his big brother.

  The flat was quickly cleared and then I was alone with the two brothers.

  Richard Halfpenny was still on his knees, hands raised, trying to understand what had happened. Edward was weeping, bent sideways in his wheelchair.

  ‘Tell them!’ he moaned. ‘Tell them!’

  ‘You can get up now,’ I told Richard.

  He stood up slowly, glancing towards the door.

  ‘Don’t they have to release him after twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Not if they plan to charge him with murder,’ I said. ‘And they can hold him for ninety-six hours if they do that.’

  ‘Edward,’ Richard said gently, placing one of his thick hands on his brother’s shoulder. ‘Please stop crying.’

  With some effort, Edward Halfpenny moved his wheelchair closer to the coffee table. He picked something up in his clawed hands. I s
aw he was fumbling with a phone.

  ‘Show him, Richard! Show him, show him!’

  ‘What do you want to show me, son?’ I said.

  Richard took the phone from his brother.

  He hit some buttons and handed it to me.

  ‘This is what he wants to show you,’ Richard said.

  And I saw George Halfpenny laughing in a swimming pool as he held up his crippled brother on his back in the water. It was a public pool, impossibly crowded in the summertime. They were both laughing.

  And even without that same hobo haircut, I thought, you would have known they were brothers.

  ‘When did Ahmed Khan get topped?’ Richard said. ‘It was Sunday afternoon, right?’

  I nodded.

  He laughed bitterly.

  ‘Stupid, stupid coppers,’ he said.

  In the bottom right-hand corner of the film there was a time and date stamp.

  The date was Sunday.

  The time was exactly when I had been waiting outside the underground station for Ahmed Khan to come home.

  I closed the phone.

  George Halfpenny had the perfect alibi.

  He could not have killed Ahmed Khan.

  ‘George takes Edward swimming every Sunday afternoon,’ Richard said. ‘It’s their time together.’ He looked at his brother in the wheelchair. ‘The doctors and the physios all say that swimming is best for him.’

  I looked at Edward Halfpenny. His mouth struggled to form the words, and his head jerked back, pulled by forces that I could not imagine. He struggled to exist inside his skin. And he would always struggle. I knelt by his side, the phone in my fist.

  ‘We go … swimming,’ Edward said. ‘My brother George works six days a week. But he would never work on a Sunday.’

  Down in the street the sirens started, as loud and empty as canned laughter.

  22

  Only Whitestone was in MIR-1 when I got to West End Central.

  ‘There’s something you need to see,’ I said.

  I had placed the phone in an evidence bag. There was a Criminal Justice Act label on the side, with a unique identification number and my name, rank and the location where the phone had been recovered. I put on a pair of blue nitrile gloves, took out the phone and called up the film of George Halfpenny in the swimming pool with his brother Edward.