Western Approaches (Jimmy Suttle) (38 page)

‘You’ve got a name for the father?’

‘Yeah. Waheed.’

She drove them to police headquarters at Millgarth in the city centre. A uniformed inspector had arranged for them to use one of the interview rooms.

Suttle wanted to know about Akhtar. Was he being picked up or what?

‘Voluntary attendance, love. If he doesn’t show, he’s on a nicking.’

At the police station she organised coffees and took them down to the interview room. To Suttle’s surprise, Akhtar was already there. He was thin and pale with a mass of jet-black curls. According to the intel file he was twenty-three but he looked much younger. His jeans had been patched at least once, and the Iron Maiden motif on his freshly laundered T-shirt was beginning to wear off.

He got up the moment Suttle and Golding stepped in. Contrary to what the intel officer had said, the last thing this kid appeared to want was trouble. He’d been offered a solicitor but he wasn’t being interviewed under caution, nor was he being investigated for any offence, so he’d decided to do without one.

Suttle did the introductions and thanked him in advance for his time. The next bit, he knew, was going to be tricky.

‘We understand you knew a man called Kinsey.’

Akhtar looked blank.

‘Jalf Rezi,’ Golding said.

‘You mean Jake?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, I do. We just became Facebook friends. I’m waiting for a link to his page.’ He had a soft voice, broad Yorkshire accent.

‘That was us, I’m afraid.’

‘What was us?’

‘The Facebook message.’

‘From Jake? The friending request?
You
sent that?’

‘We did.’

Suttle explained what had happened at Regatta Court. They’d retrieved evidence that Akhtar and Kinsey might have been buddies through the video games they played. If that was the case then they needed to talk about Kinsey.

If anything, Akhtar was more confused.

‘You’re telling me he’s dead?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How?’

‘Like I say, he fell.’

‘Sure. But why are you here? Why are you talking to me?’

Suttle didn’t answer. Akhtar was still trying to work out the implications of the friending request. He was looking at Golding. Then something seemed to dawn on him.

‘So you were playing as Jake? As Jalf?’

‘Yes.’

‘Counterstrike?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were right crap. You know that?’

Golding shrugged and looked at his hands. Suttle laughed. A smile even crossed Akhtar’s face.

‘You were right rubbish,’ he said. ‘I should have sussed you.’

Suttle wanted to know when he’d first come across Jalf Rezi.

‘Last year. I were playing Counterstrike for the first time and he wiped me out. I nearly didn’t go back after that, but then I thought why not and I went on again. This time I was OK. Better than OK. After that I played a lot. Then he were sending me the odd message, telling me how much better I was getting, you know what I mean? So I texted back and asked him what other games he played. Turned out he was big on Left 4 Dead. That did it for me. You know it? Awesome game. The best.’ He looked from one face to the other. ‘Is this OK, like? Is this what you want?’

Suttle gestured for him to carry on. Golding was making notes.

‘Left 4 Dead drops you in the middle of this horrible place. It’s a bit like where I live. There’s just ruins and wreckage and all kinds of other shit and bad people everywhere. There’s the Hunter, the Smoker, the Boomer, the Tank . . .’ He frowned, checking off the characters on his fingers.

‘The Witch?’ This from Golding.

‘Yeah. Right. The Witch. You’ve played it too?’

‘Years ago.’

‘Right. So you know you have to get to the safe house? Get inside and like close the door? I was nearly there. I was outside the safe house and I was half blind because a Boomer had puked on me and the other three guys in the game were bleeding out really fast. You know like you watch their health bars? They were gone. End of.’

‘Was Jalf one of them?’ Golding again.

‘Yeah. That’s the whole point. I got into the safe house and I knew the other guys were fucked. The nearest one, right outside the safe house, was Jalf. I needn’t have done it. I could have just let him die. I was safe in there. But Jalf comes on to me on the headphones, yells for help, really lays it on heavy. And me? I’m trying not to listen but then I think that makes me kinda mean. On the other side of the door I can hear the Boomer just waiting for me to come out so I blew him away with a couple of shotgun rounds through the door and then went out there again and killed a Hunter, and then another one, and then a Smoker, and it ended with me and Jalf back in the safe house. I needn’t have done it, I needn’t, but I did.’ He was still looking at Golding. ‘You understand that? You understand what I did?’

‘Yeah, I do. Top move.’

‘That’s what Jalf said. That’s when he asked me where I lived.’

Leeds, as it happened, had become a regular part of Kinsey’s business life. A big law firm in the city centre handled contracts for something called Kittiwake and next time Kinsey was up for a meeting he invited Akhtar for lunch.

‘We met at the Mint. You know the Mint at all? It’s a big hotel down by the canal. It were right posh. Fourteen quid for fish ’n’ chips. I had the works. It were lovely.’

Suttle was a spectator by now. Akhtar was addressing himself exclusively to Golding. Jalf, he said, wasn’t at all what he expected. He thought he’d be meeting someone rough like himself. Instead he found himself sitting with a businessman at one of the city’s top hotels.

‘What do you think Kinsey made of you?’

‘I think he thought I were all right. I told him a bit about myself, where I lived, my family, all that. My dad especially. He were very good about my dad.’

His father, he explained, had been badly injured on a building site back home. He came from a village in Mirpur and after a while in hospital he’d decided he didn’t want to live in Pakistan any more and managed to make his way to England.

‘Took him two years, that did. It must have been right hard the way he talked about it.’

Waheed settled in the big Mirpuri community in Leeds and took up with a local girl. Four kids came along. Akhtar was the eldest. By the time he was a teenager his mum was out of it on cheap cider and his dad had become a depressive.

‘All he wanted to do was go back. He missed his real home. He missed his brothers and sisters. All he’d do was cry.’

‘You told Jalf all this?’

‘Yeah. We were playing Team Fortress 2 a lot by then, that’s a favourite of mine. And Jake were good about my dad. Kind.
Really
kind.’

Listening, Suttle had the impression Akhtar had never come across much kindness in his young life. With both his parents effectively off the plot, it had fallen to him to look after his sisters. No wonder he’d turned to drug dealing.

‘So what did he do? Jalf?’

‘He gave my dad some money. A shitload of money, if you really want to know. Enough to get him back to Mirpur and set him up.’

‘You knew Kinsey well by now?’

‘I knew him OK. We never went to the Mint again but he’d always buy me something to eat.’

Suttle was leaning back in his chair. Thirteen grand, he thought, Not a bad thank you for getting Jake Kinsey into the Left 4 Dead safe house.

‘What did Jake tell you about himself?’

‘Not a lot. Not really. Except rowing. Boat stuff. He were really keen on that. He had photos.’

‘Did he talk about the guys he rowed with at all?’

‘Yeah.’ Akhtar nodded.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said they were good guys. He liked them.’

‘All of them?’

Akhtar paused. He was looking at Golding again. The young D/C gestured for him to go on.

‘He had a problem, did Jalf, if you really want to know. You could see it in his face. I thought he was, like, gay to begin with, but that weren’t it.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘I think it were to do with a woman and one of the guys in his boat. I don’t know. He never gave me names or anything.’

‘But what was the problem?’

‘I dunno.’

‘You do, Zameer, you do.’ Golding bent forward. ‘Just tell us.’

‘But it sounds daft.’

‘Tell us.’

‘OK.’ He shrugged. ‘He thought one of the guys were going to kick off.’

‘How?’

Akhtar shook his head, refusing to go any further.

Suttle and Golding exchanged glances. Then Golding leaned forward again.

‘Are we talking health bars?’ he said softly. ‘Are we talking bleeding out?’

Akhtar nodded.

‘Fucking right,’ he whispered. ‘And it were true, yeah?’

Suttle and Golding were back in Exeter by half four. Suttle rang Houghton from the airport. She asked him about Akhtar.

‘Total result, boss. We need to talk.’

‘Indeed. I’ve got Mr Nandy with me. As soon as you like, Jimmy.’

Nandy was waiting in Houghton’s office. He was on his feet by the window, a mobile pressed to each ear. The Bodmin job was coming to the boil. As, it seemed, was
Constantine
.

Nandy finished both conversations. Houghton returned with a tray of coffees and an assortment of snacks.

‘You’ve eaten?’ Suttle shook his head. ‘I thought not.’

Nandy had fetched another chair from the office next door. Suttle was already halfway through a packet of crisps. He summarised Akhtar’s account. Nandy didn’t bother to hide his disappointment.

‘No names?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Nothing in the way of hints? The look of the guy? How old he was?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Nothing about the woman involved?’

‘No.’

‘Then where does this take us?’

‘Surely it establishes that Kinsey was worried.’ It was Houghton. She was frowning. ‘And that could be significant, no?’

‘Yeah, of course it could. Call me greedy but I’d have liked a little more.’

‘There is no more, sir.’ Suttle this time. ‘The way I read it, the lad Akhtar was the closest Kinsey got to a mate. This was an arm’s-length relationship. Most of it happened on the Internet. As it happens, they got to meet. Kinsey was grateful about all this safe-house game shit and Akhtar seems to have taken his fancy. Here was someone with a problem. He’d done Kinsey a favour. Kinsey did him one back.’

‘Thirteen thousand pounds? For pressing a couple of buttons on a games console? You call that a
favour
?’

‘Kinsey was showing off. He had money. He was a can-do guy. He liked solving problems. Maybe he felt sorry for the boy. Maybe there are bits of Kinsey we’ll never know about.’

Houghton interrupted again. She thought Suttle had a point. One of the things about Kinsey’s intel profile that had been bothering her was just how locked-down the guy appeared to have been. No one, she said, could be that alone, that cut-off, that solitary. And here was the proof.

‘But he told the lad nothing. Except he was worried.’ Nandy still wasn’t convinced.

‘Exactly. Because Kinsey always pulled back. So far and no further. Am I right, Jimmy?’

Suttle nodded. On the flight back he’d been picturing Kinsey up in the vastness of his apartment, bent over his PC, the lone figure blasting the likes of the Boomer and the Witch into oblivion. Video gaming had always been a cartoon world as far as Suttle was concerned but after an hour with Golding and Zameer Akhtar he’d begun to change his mind. Left 4 Dead had taken Kinsey into the no-man’s-land between fantasy and friendship. And the rapport with Akhtar was the direct result. That kind of relationship wouldn’t have been enough for most people but it suited Kinsey very nicely indeed. No real obligations. Nothing you couldn’t settle with a couple of lunches and a cheque.

Nandy agreed to let the issue ride. Akhtar’s account was a pointer, he said, an indicator. Nothing more. He told Houghton to brief Suttle about the ATMs. This, it appeared, was proper evidence.

Houghton was amused. The data on the Jacobson debit card had arrived earlier than expected. She ducked her head to a list of figures on a pad. In all the account held £107,638.34. There was a pattern of regular withdrawals going back more than a year, sums that would appear to pay for Donovan’s supply of assorted services.

‘Great.’ Suttle had finished the crisps. ‘Perfect.’

‘Wait, Jimmy. It gets better. Kinsey’s death should have stopped the withdrawals, am I right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then look at this.’

She passed across a list of the latest movements on the Jacobson account. At 23.45 on 9 April £200 had been withdrawn from an ATM in Exmouth. The following day another £200, this time from an ATM in Yeovil.