Good as Dead (31 page)

Over the last twenty-four hours, she had begun to feel as though she understood this man who was holding her. That she could adjust to his reactions, handle things. She had not felt the need to keep pushing for sympathy or pity, to remind him that she was the mother of a small child, and when they had talked, really talked to one another, as they had only an hour before, there were moments when Helen might almost have been able to forget where they were. Now, watching him slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and the blood pulsing at his temple, she realised that she needed to sharpen up and remember exactly who and what she was.

What they both were.

Hostage and hostage taker.

She was well aware that her own emotions had been all over the place too, but reminded herself that she was not threatening to kill anyone. Yes, Akhtar had been genuinely horrified at Mitchell’s death, but Helen also remembered the sound of him smashing things up next door and she could not forget the hatred on his face when he had turned round in the shop two days before and pointed that gun at them. She recalled those moments of dark rage and the keening sobs from the next room, the tenderness then the paranoia.

Like lights going on and off.

And the fear that had begun to fold away its wings fluttered back to life in her gut, as Helen asked herself if those running the operation outside were getting as nervous as she was.

FORTY-SIX

I’m waiting for more information.

Thorne waited, and as the time passed and no other useful option presented itself, the waiting sucked the energy from him as efficiently as any physical exertion. Sapped him. He sat at the trestle table in the school hall and stared, unmoving, at the monitors, feeling heavier and more useless by the minute.

More desperate than hopeful.

Donnelly was sitting outside in the newly arrived Technical Support vehicle, poring over plans of the building; discussing the thicknesses of walls, the locations of gas and water pipes and electrical cabling. Chivers was in the playground, talking through a variety of scenarios with key members of his firearms team. Thorne did not know where Sue Pascoe had gone.

Once the Technical Support officers had been busy for a few hours there might be other pictures to look at, but for now Thorne could do little but stare at that single, fixed image of the front of Akhtar’s shop.

He stared, and began to drift.

For a few dizzying moments, despite the urgency, the tension that was clearly still ticking in all those around him, Thorne found his mind starting to wander. Staring at the monitor, there was something soporific about the picture: the occasional flicker across the image; the blurred swirls of dark graffiti against the grey shutters.

PAKI
still the only word he could make out.

Akhtar’s words:
Amin could come to us with anything
.

In that vague and comforting way that the past got wrapped up and presented to oneself, Thorne had always considered his own relationship with his parents to be reasonably open and honest, but just a few seconds of serious reflection was all it took to tear that wrapping away and reveal the truth.

Unvarnished and ugly.

Thorne had not told his mother and father he wanted to join the police force, not until it was too late anyway, when he was no more than a few days away from traipsing off to Hendon. He had not told them that he did not want to go to university. That he had no wish to take whatever exams he would need to become a lawyer or an accountant, or any of those other professions he knew would make Jim and Maureen Thorne so proud.

He had not told them that he was too afraid to fail.

He might not have dreaded their disappointment quite as much had he been telling them he was away to join the army. His father’s older brother had been a soldier, he seemed to remember, or in the air force maybe. Yes, that would definitely have gone down better. There would have been tears from his mother almost certainly, but perhaps a grudging wink from the old man later on.

Or would it have been the other way round?

The police, though?

There was no
Dixon of Dock Green
dignity about the job back then, as there might have been in the fifties or sixties. None of the
Sweeney
swagger. Thorne chose to join up just as the chickens started coming home to roost. Too many coppers on the take and rape victims treated like sluts.

Not a good time for that particular career move.

Thorne had stuck to his guns though, safe in the knowledge there was nothing they could do to stop him. He’d shouted back, his eighteen-year-old sulking skills more than a match for theirs, and bitten back the terror that first night as a cadet. Lying awake in the jockstrap-stinking dormitories that by some bizarre quirk of fate now housed his own office.

He had never really talked to them about the job either, had taken good care to avoid it. The gossip and the funny stuff, but nothing that had actually mattered.

Not Calvert.

Three dead girls, smothered in their beds by their own father. Matching ivory nightdresses splayed like angels’ wings and six tiny white feet.

Was that really the reason he and Jan had never had kids? Why he had felt so ambivalent about having a child with Louise? Some counsellor or other had said as much a few years before and Thorne had told her where to stick her Christmas-cracker theories. He had not quite been able to forget that knowing smile though, just before she’d looked back down at her notes.

His
notes.

He was vaguely aware of footsteps approaching behind him. Heels …

Jan had a kid with somebody else now and Louise would probably end up doing the same, as soon as she found someone a little quicker than Thorne had been to admit he quite fancied the idea.

Lives moved on.

‘Tom … ’

Thorne turned, just as Sue Pascoe arrived with two cups of coffee. He could smell the cigarettes as he leaned forward and gratefully took the plastic cup she was proffering.

‘I need to wake up,’ he said.

They sat and drank their coffees in silence for a minute, then turned at the sound of Chivers’ voice from the other end of the hall. He was talking to a pair of uniformed officers. There was laughter, some back-slapping.

‘He wants the same thing as we do, you know,’ Thorne said.

Pascoe looked at him. ‘Let’s hope so.’

‘Just a different way of going about things.’

She blew on her coffee, her eyes still on Chivers.

‘I’m sure he’s good at what he does.’

‘He is,’ she said. ‘I asked around.’

‘There you go then.’

She shook her head. ‘You’re good at what you do, too.’

‘Did you ask around?’

‘I didn’t have to.’

Thorne nodded, tried not to smile too much.

‘But you still fuck up,’ she said, looking at him.

‘Sorry?’

‘Same as everyone else does. Right?’

Calvert had been the big one, no question. There’s always one that shapes you, that’s what his boss had said at the time. You don’t get a lot of say in the matter. Lucky or unlucky, result or disaster, all that. Why couldn’t it have been talking someone down off a bridge though? Or saving a playground full of kids from some headcase with a samurai sword?

Someone to catch and someone to save. Right up your street.

Louise knew him well enough. Knew which of them he would pick if he could only choose one.

‘Right?’ Pascoe asked again.

Thorne looked at her. Unable, unwilling, to speak.

‘Only problem is,’ she said, nodding towards the other end of the hall, ‘if he fucks up, so do I. So have I.’ She turned back to Thorne. ‘Chivers could shoot a hostage in the face, but in the end it would still be down to me. The hostage is mine to lose, do you see?’

Thorne sipped his coffee.

He could certainly see the intensity in Pascoe’s eyes, but he was not sure if her concern was based on anything other than professional pride. Was she thinking only about doing her job properly, about her record as a negotiator? Or had she genuinely come to care about the well-being of Stephen Mitchell and Helen Weeks? Of Javed Akhtar? Thorne supposed that it didn’t much matter, that it might be all those things, but still he did not know what to say to her.

When his mobile rang on the table, he grabbed at it.

‘DI Thorne?’

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Wendy Markham.’

Thorne waited, unable to place the name.

‘I was running the DNA sample. The beer can in Hackney?’

‘God, sorry. Thanks for getting back to me.’ Thorne could feel a tingle of excitement. He sat up straight in his chair. He glanced across at Pascoe who raised her eyebrows.

‘Am I first?’

‘Yes,’ Thorne said. ‘You’re first.’

‘Good, because we’ve got you a nice cold hit. Jonathan Bridges, aged eighteen, record a mile long. He just served six months for robbing a junkie at knifepoint.’

‘Bridges?’ Thorne had seen the name written down somewhere. He struggled to remember. ‘Served six months where?’

There was a pause as Markham consulted her notes. ‘Barndale YOI.’

Even as Thorne had asked the question, it had come to him. The boy’s name on a list along with ten others. The patients on the hospital wing the night Amin Akhtar had died, the boys that Dawes had questioned eight weeks ago. He swallowed hard, remembering what Hendricks had said a couple of nights before, his suggestion that one of the other patients had been responsible for Amin’s death.

He was half right …

Thorne signalled to Pascoe, who quickly passed him a pen and a scrap of paper. He scribbled down the name.

‘Will that do you?’ Markham asked.

‘That’s fantastic, thanks.’

‘So, what about this wine then? Dinner … ’

‘Absolutely,’ Thorne said. ‘But I’ll need to get back to you. Merlot, right?’

‘Yes—’

‘I’ll call you.’ Thorne hung up and immediately began dialling.

‘Merlot?’ Pascoe said.

Thorne shook his head. Long story. When Holland answered, Thorne gave him the name of their prime suspect and told him to check with the Probation Service, the DSS, whoever the hell would be quickest with the most recent address for Jonathan Bridges. He told Holland to call straight back with any information, to ask Brigstocke to organise a support team on the hurry-up, and said that wherever Bridges turned out to be living, he would meet him there.

‘Got what you needed?’ Pascoe asked, when Thorne had hung up.

Thorne said, ‘Both of us, I reckon,’ and the two of them sat staring at the phone, willing it to ring.

FORTY-SEVEN

‘I’m sorry about before,’ Akhtar said. ‘When I got so worked up. I could see that it was upsetting you.’

‘It’s fine, I understand,’ Helen said.

‘No, it’s not fine.’ He was still sitting at the desk, but the tension had gone from his face. He moved his chair a little closer to her. ‘I seem to have lost control over the way I respond to things. Does that make any sense?’

Helen told him that it did.

‘I always used to think carefully about things first, you know? Whatever happened, good news or bad news, it would take a while to sink in and feel real, but these days everything is speeded up. Everything is more intense, much brighter, much darker. I’m absurdly happy or far more miserable. Very much angrier … ’

‘Your son went to prison,’ Helen said. ‘Then he died, was killed, so you’re not going to feel normal about anything.’

‘I suppose that’s right.’

‘Of course you’re not.’ She was still wary, aware that the mood Akhtar was in at that moment might not be the same one he would be in five minutes from now, but she needed to do everything possible to keep him where he was. To maintain the calm. ‘
This
is hardly … normal, is it?’

Akhtar shook his head, ran a hand slowly across the top of it.

‘One man is already dead, Javed.’

He nodded, solemn. ‘If I was reading about something like this in one of my papers,’ Akhtar said, ‘I would despise the person doing it. I would talk about what was happening with Nadira and in the shop with my customers, and we would all shake our heads and tut-tut and say how disgusting it was, asking ourselves what the world was coming to and so on. I would be thinking about the people being held against their will, nothing else, thinking about their families. I swear to God, I would not give a damn if the man who was doing such things lost his life. I would be happy for the police to do whatever was necessary.’

Helen pointed to Akhtar, then to herself. ‘This … is not you,’ she said.

He asked her if she would like to watch the television for a while, but she said no. Much as she would have appreciated the chance to get lost for a while in something nice and mindless, she thought it was important to keep talking. At least until she was sure things were back on an even keel.

As even as it was ever likely to get, at least.

‘You know, even on that first night when Amin came home, I did not get upset straight away,’ Akhtar said. ‘Nadira went to pieces as you would expect, the sight of all that blood, but I kept it all inside for a while, same as always. Even when I knew what had happened, when I discovered that this other boy was dead, I just
thought
about it. I was trying to
understand
, trying to work out what needed to be done and it was like all the emotions I should have been feeling were just laid to one side for later on.’

‘People do that,’ Helen said.

‘When he was killed, I did not even cry like a father
should
cry for his son.’ He shook his head. His voice had dropped. ‘Can you believe that? I felt ashamed that I was not like my wife, like the rest of the family. Nadira wept enough for all of us of course, rivers of tears, but still … I felt as though I was letting Amin down or something. Like I did not love him as much as I thought.’

‘Someone has to be strong.’

‘I did not feel strong, Miss Weeks,’ he said. ‘I just felt … inhuman.’ He glanced at the gun and sighed, he looked exhausted suddenly. ‘What’s happening now, all these feelings like bolts of lightning, this blackness … I think maybe I am paying the price for what I was like back then. You are paying the price too, and Mr Mitchell.’