Girl On Fire_DC Max Wolfe Read online

  Gordon Hunt seemed wide-awake now.

  ‘And after Mr and Mrs Khan had fled the building with their granddaughter you went down to the basement and witnessed C3 – DC Vann – discharge his weapon into Adnan Khan.’

  Again, it is not a question.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not what happened.’

  I am not going to rat him out.

  But I am not going to lie for him.

  I felt the sweat trickle down my back for the first time today.

  Because I suddenly understood that I was attempting to do the impossible.

  How far can you bend the truth until it stops being the truth?

  ‘I heard a single shot in the basement,’ I said slowly. ‘I then left the kitchen and went down into the basement. C3 had already discharged his weapon. I assumed that Khan had made some move for a weapon or that C3 – DC Vann – believed he had made such a move. I identified the target, Adnan Khan. He was dead.’

  They let that sit there for a while. They made a point of not looking at each other. The perspiration slid further down my spine.

  My Federation rep was perfectly still.

  ‘Just to be clear,’ Hunt said. ‘You were not in the basement when Khan was killed?’

  ‘No.’

  Hunt consulted his notes.

  ‘Because C3’s testimony puts you down there.’ He paused. ‘In the basement, DC Wolfe, when the fatal shot was fired, DC Vann insists you were there and you witnessed Adnan Khan on his feet and making a sudden movement, as if to retrieve a weapon – although no weapons were found in that basement. You can’t corroborate his version of events?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he lying?’

  I felt my mouth tighten.

  ‘Our colleagues in SCO19 are under enormous – unimaginable – pressure,’ I said. ‘C3 is not lying – he is mistaken. Did you ever hear a shot fired in anger?’ I said. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Are you trying to insult me, DC Wolfe?’

  ‘I’m trying to see if you understand what sustained automatic gunfire does to everything – your hearing, your blood pressure, your balance, your heart rate, your perception of time. All of it. Gunfire is strange – it just seems to crowd out the rest of the world. It takes over. It dominates everything. So I don’t think DC Vann is lying to you, sir,’ I repeated for the tape. ‘I think that he is mistaken.’

  ‘Maybe you’re the one who is mistaken, DC Wolfe. Is that also a possibility?’

  ‘I am quite certain that I was not in that basement until after Mr Khan died.’

  ‘Did Mr Khan get what was coming to him, DC Wolfe?’ Hunt said.

  ‘I don’t think terrorists can reasonably expect to die of old age in their beds, sir.’

  ‘Did you and C3 speak to each other?’ Flynn said. ‘When you finally arrived in the basement?’

  ‘I believe I said his name. His first name. Raymond. I do not recall C3 – DC Vann – speaking to me.’

  ‘But you said that you had never met before,’ Hunt said. ‘So how did you know his name?’

  I told them the truth without thinking about it.

  ‘Because DS Stone spoke to him when we were on our way to Borodino Street. She said, “You OK, Raymond?” So I knew his name was Raymond.’

  ‘C3 says that Khan was on his feet and making a sudden move for what he assumed to be a weapon,’ Hunt said. ‘And this is why we are struggling to believe his version of events.’

  Flynn touched her keyboard and two line-drawings of a little generic man appeared on the screen, face on and sideways. The sideways drawing has a line entering the drawn man around the middle of his chest and leaving around the bottom of his back.

  ‘That’s the post-mortem trajectory of the gunshot that killed Mr Khan,’ Hunt said. ‘Ballistics inform us that a single shot entered Mr Khan’s heart and exited from the base of his spine. And as you can see, the autopsy agrees with this theory.’

  ‘How do you explain it?’ Flynn said. ‘If Mr Khan was standing and making an abrupt movement for a weapon? Why did the gunshot enter his chest on entry and exit just above his buttocks? If he was standing, it doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  ‘I am not attempting to explain it,’ I said.

  The IPCC investigators took a moment.

  ‘Mr Khan was on his knees when he was shot, wasn’t he, DC Wolfe?’ Hunt said. ‘DC Vann was pumped up, understandably terrified, full of anger about what had just happened to his team leader on the street. He had an unarmed man on his knees and he executed him. Isn’t that what happened, DC Wolfe?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Hunt.’

  ‘Because you were not in the basement when it happened,’ he said.

  And it wasn’t a question.

  Because they had no more questions for me.

  I rode down to the ground floor with my Federation rep.

  ‘Heroes before breakfast,’ he said. ‘Murderers before mid-morning tea. Who’d be a shot, eh?’

  We shook hands.

  ‘Not me,’ I said.

  Back in MIR-1, TDC Adams had a message for me.

  ‘Paddington Green called,’ she said. ‘You should call DCI Flashman.’

  I returned Flashman’s call.

  ‘You want Ahmed Khan, Wolfe?’ he said. ‘You can have him.’

  ‘You’re not charging him?’

  ‘You were right,’ Flashman said. ‘He’s as simple as he looks. As far as we can make out, all his known associates are other bus drivers. And get this, Wolfe: the old man says he wants to go home.’ Flashman was chuckling with amusement. ‘To the house on Borodino Street!’

  I looked up at the TV screen. I saw the crowds, the flowers for Alice Stone, the house that had been torn apart. I could not imagine anyone ever living in that place again.

  ‘So Ahmed Khan’s not running an al-Qaeda cell from the number 73 bus, Flashman? That’s a turn-up for the book.’

  I heard his hot breath.

  ‘The man had three sons,’ Flashman said. ‘Every one of them was a murdering jihadist bastard. He’s bloody lucky to be getting out so soon. Accept nothing, believe no one, check everything. How did you miss that lecture at Hendon, Wolfe? Were you walking that little dog of yours?’

  ‘If you smell guilt on him, then why are you slinging him out, Flashman?’

  The police can hold someone for twenty-four hours before we either have to charge them with a crime or set them free. The only exception is if someone is suspected of terrorism. Then we can hold them for fourteen days.

  ‘We need the cell,’ Flashman said. ‘This old bus driver is a cell-blocker for the really bad boys. We will let him sweat for a few more days – that should be long enough for the generous British state to find him and his family a safe house – and then we will chuck him out. Dig out the welcome mat, Wolfe.’

  Edie Wren and Joy Adams were staring at me as I hung up.

  ‘They’re releasing Ahmed Khan without charge,’ I said.

  ‘And what are we meant to do with him?’ Edie said.

  I looked again at the crowds and the flowers and the cops on Borodino Street.

  ‘Keep him alive,’ I said.

  9

  At the end of a week when the death toll at the Lake Meadows shopping centre crept up to forty-six, and the crowds kept coming to Borodino Street, and the sea of flowers just kept getting bigger, I drove one hour west of the city and I parked the old BMW X5 in a spot where all I could see were green rolling hills with the river running through them, the Thames – and it was still the Thames out here – molten gold in the sunshine of early summer.

  I let Stan off the leash and he busied himself nibbling the grass, delicately careful as a rabbit, while I sat on a bench by the towpath and stared upriver. The track leading to Henley-on-Thames had a scattering of joggers, dog walkers and tourists who had strolled out of town. As Stan munched grass – he found it aided his digestion – I watched the river with its sightseeing boats and the sculls of rowers.

  Afte
r a while I saw them coming down the towpath.

  A small woman with fair hair and dark glasses, maybe forty, and a teenage boy, no older than sixteen but a full head and shoulders taller than the woman. But they still looked like mother and son. The boy also wore dark glasses and there was an assistance dog loping at his side, a Labrador-Retriever mix with fur the colour of melted butter.

  The woman was Detective Chief Inspector Pat Whitestone, my senior officer and the most experienced homicide cop in West End Central. The boy was her son Justin, who had lost his sight in one of those mindless eruptions of violence that can come out of nowhere in the teenage years.

  And the dog was Dasher.

  Stan’s nose perked up at the familiar scent of Dasher and he ran off to greet the party and his old friend. Whitestone and Justin greeted him warmly but Dasher, who had been trained to never be distracted from his role, merely gave Stan a quick butt-sniff for form’s sake and then looked up at his master.

  ‘How’s the holiday?’ I asked them.

  Whitestone and Justin were walking the full length of the Thames Path, the national trail that runs for almost two hundred miles from the river’s source deep in the heart of the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier in the East End.

  ‘Cool,’ Justin said.

  ‘You should do it with Scout,’ Whitestone said. ‘Best walk in the country.’

  Justin walked down to the riverbank with the two dogs, Stan capering with mad glee by the side of the calm, solemn Dasher.

  ‘Not too close to the water,’ Whitestone called.

  ‘I can hear it,’ Justin replied, frowning with irritation.

  Whitestone and I sat on the bench. We watched her son and our dogs.

  ‘You can do it in fifteen days but we’re taking three weeks,’ Whitestone said. ‘We had a rest day in Oxford, we’re taking another one here and then one more in Windsor.’

  ‘Legoland,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to Windsor with Scout.’

  ‘Justin’s Legoland days are over,’ Whitestone said. ‘How are you, Max?’

  We had only briefly spoken on the phone after Lake Meadows, my boss checking in with me from her holiday to let me know – without ever actually saying the words – that she was glad I was alive.

  ‘The knee’s healing well,’ I said.

  Whitestone waited for more.

  ‘I think about the people I saw after the helicopter came down,’ I said, watching the river. ‘There was a security guard who lost an arm. There was an old lady and her husband lying on the ground. And there was a man – a man in a suit and tie, some kind of executive – carrying a bag from the Apple store and he was covered in this grey dust. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about them and I wonder if they made it out alive. And I wonder if they are awake in the middle of the night, too.’

  She nodded with understanding. But there was nothing she could tell me.

  ‘And was it a bigger network than just the brothers?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it. Counter Terrorism haven’t arrested anyone else and they are not charging Ahmed Khan.’

  ‘The father?’

  I nodded. ‘Flashman’s got him banged up in Paddington Green but they’re going to release him in a few days. They’re waiting for a safe house. Apparently there’s a long waiting list for safe houses. And they’re handing him to West End Central.’

  ‘To us? Why??’

  ‘To make sure nobody tops him.’

  ‘You want me to come back early?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Enjoy your holiday. Finish your walk. I can handle it. But Ahmed Khan doesn’t want to go to a safe house. He wants to go home to Borodino Street.’

  ‘And Borodino Street is still a crime scene.’

  ‘But not for much longer. I don’t know how long we can keep him in a safe house if he doesn’t want to be there. The search teams and the CSIs have torn that house apart and there’s still no sign of those two Croatian hand grenades that were meant to be on the premises. There’s nothing left to bag, dust or photograph. There’s nowhere left to search. And there’s nobody standing trial for the murder of Alice Stone because the man who killed her is dead.’

  Whitestone thought about it.

  ‘The old man knew nothing about his sons? Really?’

  Like Edie, she was struggling to believe it was a case of innocent contact.

  ‘He’s a bus driver,’ I said. ‘I know it sounds unlikely that someone could have a terrorist cell on the other side of the breakfast table and know nothing about it. But I believe that’s what happened.’

  ‘And the old man wants to go back to normal life,’ Whitestone said, shaking her head. She took off her shades. They were prescription sunglasses, and her blue myopic eyes had a vulnerable look as she squinted in the dazzling early morning sunshine. ‘He might find that normal life isn’t there any more,’ she said. ‘Who’s going to be in the safe house with him?’

  ‘His wife and their granddaughter, if social services haven’t got their claws into the kid. And I need to know what the drill is for the Khan family going home when their house is no longer a crime scene.’

  Whitestone shook her head.

  ‘There is no drill,’ she said. ‘It’s always different with former crime scenes. People die in one place and it gets razed to the ground. Someone gets their head bashed in at some other place and life carries on as if nothing much happened. It all depends if someone wants to live there. Dennis Nilsen’s flat is still in Muswell Hill but Fred and Rose West’s house was bought by the local council and demolished. John Christie’s house at 10 Rillington Place is a garden now but the house where Lord Lucan allegedly topped the nanny is still there in Belgravia. Property value has a lot to do with it. And the body count. Borodino Street in the East End? I don’t know.’

  ‘Three people died there.’

  ‘Two of them don’t count. Terrorists – even alleged terrorists – don’t count. But Alice Stone died there, and she has struck a nerve in this country because she gave her life fighting the bastards who were responsible for Lake Meadows.’ Whitestone shrugged. ‘I can’t honestly see how the Khans can go home. Their house is a memorial now. But if Ahmed Khan is not going to be charged with anything, and if the property is in his name, then I don’t see how we can stop him.’

  ‘Should we give him an Osman warning?’

  An Osman warning is a notice issued by a police force to officially warn someone that their life is in danger but that we do not have sufficient evidence to arrest a possible offender.

  ‘Has anyone made a threat on Khan’s life?’

  ‘Not that I am aware of, no.’

  ‘Then the Osman warning can wait until someone threatens to kill the old boy.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll have to wait long,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen the crowds on Borodino Street. You’ve seen the strength of feeling about the death of Alice Stone.’

  Whitestone nodded.

  ‘And I share those feelings. When we’re back in town, the first thing I am going to do is take some flowers to Borodino Street.’ She paused, as if trying to understand her need to place some flowers with all those other flowers. ‘Alice was the best of us,’ she said.

  We watched the dogs and the boy sitting down at the river’s edge. Another rowing scull went past, seeming to glide on the surface of the river, the tiny coxswain in the stern urging the crew on. Justin raised his head at the sound of their calls.

  ‘We heard from Scout’s mother,’ I said.

  ‘What does she want?’ Whitestone said. ‘Don’t tell me. She wants Scout back in her life.’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Guilt,’ Whitestone said. ‘I had the same with Justin’s dad. It hits them every now and again. The absent parent. Terrible guilt. But they get over it remarkably well.’

  ‘Is that all it is?’ I said. ‘Guilt?’

  ‘What else would it be?’ Whitestone said.

  We stared at the river in silence, two si
ngle parents reflecting on the fecklessness of the absent parent and in that moment the fact that we were a man and a woman mattered a lot less than the fact that we were both single parents.

  ‘Who’s the kid preaching to the crowds in Borodino Street?’ Whitestone said.

  So she had seen him too. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

  ‘Then you better find out,’ my boss said. ‘And keep looking for those grenades.’

  ‘We’ve been doing nothing else, boss,’ I said.

  Knocking on for midnight on Friday in Camden Town, and the creatures of the night were coming out to play.

  Some of them were coming out to play for the very first time – the wide-eyed rich kids from the big houses who were just the other side of their exams – and others had been coming out to play in these loud, dark places for ten, twenty or forty years. The man I sought was one of the forty-year men.

  Nils looked like a diseased crow.

  Thin, beaky, with a spiked-up hairdo that was a tribute to the young Keith Richards. That elaborate hair had stood in proud homage to Keith for four decades, thinned only slightly by time, it was now kept jet black with bottles of After Midnight dye from Boots the Chemist.

  Nils strolled on to the stage of a semi-legendary club by the canal and turned his back to the audience, revealing several inches of butt crack as he bent over the electric guitars that waited in their stands.

  A few of the audience – that motley Camden Town crew of hungry fresh young faces and drug-raddled party people – smirked and giggled at the bottom reveal as Nils fussed with the tuning of a battered Fender Telecaster.

  They stopped laughing when he effortlessly slashed the main riff from ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. His crow face impassive, Nils put the Fender back in its stand and turned his attention to the bass guitar.

  Same routine. Bend, butt crack reveal, tune and then play a riff that was so good it was identical to the record. This time it was the bass line to ‘Going to a Go-Go’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.