by Blake Banner
There was a spasm of pain across his face, but it vanished as soon as it appeared. Then he frowned at Dehan. “You married?”
She pointed at me. “To that man over there.”
I smiled blandly. “This is our honeymoon.”
He grunted. “Pity,” he said ambiguously. “Where are you staying?”
“The Ritz.”
His eyes went wide. “The Yard is putting you up at the Ritz?” He turned to stare at Harry. “No wonder the country is going to the dogs!” He turned back to me. “But if I need to contact you, I can find you at the Ritz, can I?”
I muttered something about it being a long story and handed him my card. “You have my cell phone there, and my email.”
“If I think of anything, I’ll let you know. Meantime, you should talk to that Hassan chap. He’s your man.”
We were being invited to leave. We stood and he stood with us. “My secretary will see you out.”
We didn’t speak on the way out, but Harry pulled his cell from his pocket and made a call. As we stepped into the humid heat of the gray midmorning, he started to talk.
“Yeah, DI Harry Green here. I need a dispatch rider, Little College Street. Going to Union Road, SW8. Very urgent.”
Dehan sat on the hood of his car, looking at him. A brief gust of cool wind came in off the river and far off a barge moaned. He gave us a humorless smile and said, “Well, that went well, didn’t it?”
Dehan shrugged. “I’m sorry, Harry. I knew he was sympathetic to the Israelis. He was being a pain in the ass and we were getting nowhere. I thought it was worth a shot. Guys like that, sometimes you have to bust their balls a bit.”
“No, you’re quite right. I let him walk all over me. I invited you to consult on this case because you’re good. I can’t really complain when you, um… do your thing, can I?”
I looked up at the seagulls wheeling overhead under the gray sky and asked, “What do you want to do next? You want to see this Sadiq guy alone?”
He gave a small sigh. “No, I think I’d rather like to let Carmen loose on him.”
We all managed a smile and a short while later, the police dispatch rider pulled into the street. Harry went to talk to him and give him the bag of cotton wool buds, and I gave Dehan a smile that was rueful.
She said, “I’m sorry, Stone. He’s your friend.”
“After today, I’m not so sure. I think I have strained that friendship pretty much to breaking point. I think we may soon get thanked politely and invited to return to New York.”
She grimaced. “Is that my fault?”
I shook my head. “No, what I did this morning was beyond the pale. I knew it would be, but I had to do it. This was just the cherry on the cake. I was surprised. Fifteen years ago, he would have taken Chiddester apart.”
She squinted at him down the road, where he was talking to the dispatch rider. The breeze caught her hair and for a moment I thought how lucky I was to have this second chance. “I guess it’s easy to be brave when you’re young, and you haven’t much to lose. Maybe he’s married.” She looked up at me. “Maybe he has kids, school fees, a mortgage, all those things that sap your heroism and make your boss so powerful.”
I nodded. Maybe she was right. I had no idea.
He turned and started walking back toward us. I didn’t know if he had married, if he had kids or a mortgage, and it struck me as ironic that I knew so much about the man whom I hated, who had killed my wife and almost destroyed me, and yet I knew so little about the man I had once considered my closest friend.
“Right, chaps,” he said. “That’s on its way. We’ll have the results this evening. They’ll email me. Good enough?”
“Superb.”
“Shall we go an’ see this ‘grubby little fellow’ then?”
We climbed in the car and slammed the doors. He fired up the engine, and as he pulled away, I said, “We’ve been here over two weeks, and the only times we’ve seen you have been when somebody got murdered. We should get together before we leave and have a meal.”
He nodded and smiled. He knew what I was doing, and it was OK. “That’d be nice.”
“You married? We lost touch. I don’t know what you’ve been doing these past years.”
He was silent for a moment, then burst out laughing. He pointed a finger at me. “You are forbidden from speaking for the rest of the day. Do not open your mouth again! Every time you open your mouth, you put your sodding foot in it!”
“What did I do?”
He shook his head. “She’s talking about divorce. I’m telling her not to. The kids are at a critical age, twelve and thirteen. We married just after you left. It’s a time when a lot of couples go through a difficult patch. I want us to see it through. We still like each other, you know. We have a lot to fight for…” He paused. We pulled out onto Milbank and headed west. “But she complains about the job, the hours, she has no support… She’s right. She has a point. But what can I do? I can’t be in two places at the same time, and I can’t just magically go into another job that pays double and is half as demanding, can I?”
He looked at me as though he thought I might have an answer. Dehan’s voice came from the back. “Boy, you are on fire today, Stone.”
I made a face. “That’s why I married a cop.”
He didn’t answer. I knew what he was thinking: ‘Not the first time, you didn’t.’ And I wondered, what would have happened to my ideal love affair, to my perfect marriage, if she had lived? If she hadn’t been murdered? Would we have made it? Or would the stresses and tensions of time and work have started to show, and tell? Would children and long hours have come between us? Would that romantic passion of being in love have faded over time and become mere love, and then friendship, and then not even that, but simply the bonds of familiarity—even contempt? Would she have met someone else? Would I have met Dehan? And if I had…
I blinked. None of that happened, because she was killed. And then I met Dehan—and her attitude. I said, “If you feel it’s worth fighting for, Harry, fight for it. Woo her, romance her, rekindle the fire, sacrifice the job if you have to, get transferred to a nine till five desk. Nothing is more important than your family.”
I saw him glance in the mirror at Dehan. I heard her say, “He’s right, Harry. Family is where it’s at.”
And we moved on along the river, toward Whitechapel, and Sadiq Hassan.
EIGHT
We arrived shortly before lunch time. He had a small, two story house on the corner of Duckett Street and Bale Road, opposite a large building site that sported a billboard written entirely in Arabic. In the window, there was a large red poster showing a fist clenching a sickle. In black letters it said ‘Whitechapel Marxist Party.’ Harry rang the bell and I saw a figure peer through the window. A moment later, the door opened halfway and a young man in his mid twenties peered out. He looked Mediterranean, with thick black hair, dark eyes and olive skin. He was unshaven and barefoot, in black jeans and a black T-shirt with the same logo as his poster, only in white.
Harry said, “Sadiq Hassan?”
“Who are you?”
He had an accent, but it wasn’t strong. Harry showed him his badge. “Detective Inspector Henry Green, these are Detectives Stone and Dehan, who are accompanying me. Are you Sadiq Hassan?”
“What if I am?”
“If you are, then we’d like to ask you some questions, sir.”
“What about?”
“Well, sir, if you’re not Sadiq Hassan, that’s none of your business, is it? So once again, are you Sadiq Hassan?”
Five seconds of silence in a conversation is a long time. He took at least that long to stare at each one of us. He took a couple of seconds longer with Dehan before he answered, and echoed Chiddester’s question, but with a different tone to his voice.
“Dehan?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, it’s Irish.”
He opened the door the full way and leaned on the jamb. “I am
Sadiq Hassan. So, what?” His eyes strayed to Dehan again and he gave her the once over.
Harry ignored his manner and asked him, “Do you know a young lady, name of Katie Ellison?”
He didn’t answer. He looked at Harry’s shoes, then his pants. His face said they were the most disgusting shoes and pants he’d ever seen. Then he looked at his shirt in the same way, and finally at his face.
“Why you askin’ me about this fuckin’ bitch?” I felt Dehan stiffen and put my hand on her arm. “You come to my house, askin’ about this whore? Why you come to my house askin’ about this whoring bitch?”
“Why don’t we do something, Mr. Hassan? Why don’t I ask the questions, and you provide the answers? Now, once again. Do you know Katie Ellison?”
He curled his lip and nodded. “Yeah, I know Katie Ellison. She is a fuckin’ whoring bitch. What else you want to know?”
Harry pulled out a notebook and a pencil. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Week ago.”
“Where did you see her?”
“At a meeting of the WMP. The lying bitch said she wanted to be a member and get involved. She was fuckin’ lying, innit?”
I scratched my chin. “How do you know she was lying?”
“I looked in her bag. She had a digital recorder, with interviews on it. She’d been recording our fuckin’ meetin’s. She was writin’ some kind of fuckin’ article, innit? Some kind of fuckin’ exposé.” He turned his head and looked Dehan in the face. “Plus she was fuckin’ some Jew. Dirty bitch. How any woman can fuck a Jew, she must be a filthy whore, I tell you.”
I kept my voice real quiet. “You better keep a civil tongue in your head, Sadiq.”
He smiled. “Oh yeah? The big American, coming here threatening the Arabs again. What you gonna do? Bomb my house? Fuck you!”
Harry spoke loudly. “Where was this meeting, Mr. Hassan?”
“In my house.”
“Was there an altercation?”
Sadiq was quiet and still for a long moment.
“Do you understand the question, Mr. Hassan? Did you have a…”
“Yeah! I understand the fuckin’ question! I told her to get out! I tried to take her recorder, because I reckon the stuff on it was mine and belonged to me, innit? But she fought me and Bernard, some English piece of shit secretary of the party held me back and she left. That was the last time I seen her. You should go and get the fuckin’ recorder from her, if you was proper police!”
“Have you got an address for her?”
“Yeah, Halcrow Street.”
Harry nodded. “That’s just up the road, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you go and visit her afterwards, to try again to get the recordings back?”
Sadiq frowned. “No. Why?”
“We are almost done, Mr. Hassan. Just one more question. Are you familiar with the Butcher of Whitechapel?”
Sadiq’s eyes narrowed. He spoke cautiously. “Somethin’, why?”
Harry put the notebook and the pencil back in his pocket. “Why?” he said. “Why? Because Katie Ellison was found raped and murdered yesterday, Mr. Hassan, in her flat on Halcrow Street. And I’m wondering if you would be willing to give us samples of your DNA and fingerprints, so we can compare them with samples found at the scene. What do you say, Mr. Hassan?”
His face had turned a pasty gray. He was shaking his head. “No, no… No way. This is harassment because I’m a Muslim…”
Harry sighed. “We will be back with a warrant, Mr. Hassan. If we are going to find your DNA and prints at the scene, you’re better off telling us now and explaining why. Lies won’t help you.”
His eyes were swiveling from me to Dehan and back to Harry again. “OK, come in, but just the living room. You cannot go anywhere else. That is my family in there. You stay away from them.”
He led us into a small, dingy living room with a TV, two cheap sofas and a shelf with two books: Islamic Marxism and the Koran. Sadiq sat on the sofa opposite the TV. Harry and I sat on the other and Dehan remained standing with her arms crossed.
“We was seein’ each other for a couple of weeks, right? So I went to her place a couple of times and we had sex. So you’re going to find my prints and my DNA there, most likely. But I didn’t kill her.” His face kind of twisted and he said, “It would be no crime if I had, in Sharia. And you will incorporate Sharia into British law, you’ll see. She said she converted, but it was a lie, and she was havin’ sex with a Jew while she was saying she was my woman. She deserved to die for that, in the eyes of Allah! But I didn’t kill her.”
I saw Harry’s face flush. “Unfortunately for you, Mr. Hassan, this country doesn’t operate Sharia law. And under the laws of the United Kingdom, you can convert as often as you like to whatever religion you like, and you can have sex with whomever you please. We’ll leave it to the jury to decide whether you killed Miss Ellison or not.” He stood and I stood with him. “I’ll be back with a warrant for your DNA.”
He stared at us with wide eyes as we moved toward the door. As we were stepping out, Dehan looked at him like he was crazy. “Do you know anything about Karl Marx?” He just stared. He didn’t answer. “You know he was a Jew, right? You know he created Marxism in the first place to protect Jews against German and Austrian anti-Semitism, right?” She shook her head and stepped out the door, muttering, “Dumb asshole.”
As we reached the car and climbed in, he shouted from the door, pointing at Dehan. “You’re a racist! You called me an asshole because I am a Muslim!”
She paused, halfway in the car. “No, I called you an asshole because you’re an asshole, asshole.”
We climbed in and closed the doors. Harry was on the radio. “I need a twenty-four hour watch on Sadiq Hassan as of now. I want to know where he goes, who he sees, who he talks to, what he eats, drinks, where he shits! Everything!”
The radio crackled and a girl’s voice said “Literally, boss?”
“No, not literally, Karen…”
“Didn’t think so, sir. Everything apart from where he shits, then?”
“Yes, Karen, everything apart from that.”
“Right you are, boss.”
I said, “He didn’t do it.”
“I know. I wish he had, though, nasty piece of work. But he reacted all wrong to my question about the Butcher…”
Dehan spoke up from the back. “And if he had killed her, he would have made sure the whole world knew why. The Butcher of Whitechapel has no meaning for him.”
I sucked my teeth and asked nobody in particular, “So who’s this Jewish guy she was seeing?”
A dark blue Ford Mondeo rolled past and Harry suddenly fired up the engine and pulled away. “They’re here,” he said. “I need to talk to CID. This whole thing is getting way out of hand. One thing is clear…”
I glanced at him. “What?”
“You were right from the start. This has nothing to do with the Butcher of Whitechapel.”
I made a face and a long, “Hmmmmm…” noise.
He looked at me sharply. “Don’t tell me you now think it has!”
I could hear Dehan sniggering in the back. “You are such a pain in the ass, Stone…”
“The killing was not committed by the same guy. But that is not the same as saying they are not connected. There is a connection.”
Harry was shaking his head. “No. This is political.” We drove in silence for a while. He chewed his lip, leaning forward slightly over the steering wheel. “That was a purely psycho-sexual motivation: some dark, Freudian need to punish his mother or something equally unedifying. This is political. The motivation is totally different. I’ll drop you back at the hotel.”
We didn’t talk again until we had arrived at Piccadilly and he’d pulled up outside the hotel. As we were about to climb out, he said, “I’ll be in touch after I’ve spoken to the chaps at CID. Enjoy London for the afternoon. Let’s have dinner soon.”
We thanked him a
nd he drove away.
Dehan said, “He’s giving us the shove.”
I watched his car disappear into the traffic. “Yup.”
“Do you care?”
I looked at her and nodded. “Yup.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s got it wrong.”
She shrugged and sighed. “Well, it’s not our case, Stone. So what do you want to do this afternoon?”
I smiled at her. “In this order, have a pre-lunch martini in the bar, a light lunch in the dining room, and then we’ll go and see Lord Chiddester, probably at his country house in West Sussex.”
She thumped me on the chest. “Come on, Stone! Give it up!” We started toward the door and the doorman opened it for us. “The first two sound great. The third is dumb. You’ve been told to leave it alone. They’ve got this.”
We stepped into the cool, elegant lobby and moved toward the cocktail bar. “I am not going to do anything, Dehan, except accept His Lordship’s invitation.”
“Really?”
“You shall regret your sarcastic tone. You see if you don’t.”
We had negotiated to potted palms and were now in the dark cool of the cocktail bar. I signaled the waiter. “Two martinis, very dry…” I smiled. “Shaken, not stirred.”
Dehan turned her back on the bar and leaned her elbow on it. “OK, Stone, John Stone, what makes you so sure Lord Chiddester is going to invite us to West Sussex?”
“Because he asked how he could contact us, and he is on his way to Chiddester even as we speak, to be with his wife. He’s a hard man who doesn’t show his feelings, but he is also a passionate man of strict morals who wants his daughter’s killer caught. He believes Muslims are involved, he doesn’t trust Harry to do the job, but he is impressed by you, and our attitude to the case. He also reasons that we are not bound by the police code of conduct. He will have his secretary contact us in the next hour, and probably send a car. Perhaps a Rolls or a Bentley.”
“In your dreams, pal. Even if you were right, how can you know that he’ll do that in the next hour? You’re showing off.”