The man who had been waiting to be served moved closer to her. Was he trying to protect her, or protect himself? Either way, he was breathing heavily and when she turned she could see that he was eyeing up the door, wondering if he should make a dash for it.
Trying to decide whether or not to make a move.
Same as she was.
‘You lot are pussies without a bomb in your backpack.’ The white boy took another step towards the counter. He was grinning and opened his mouth to say something else, then stopped when he saw Mr Akhtar reach quickly below the counter and come up with a baseball bat.
One of the boys at the fridge whistled, mock-impressed, and said, ‘Oh, look out.’
The newsagent moved surprisingly quickly.
Helen took a step towards the end of the counter, but felt herself held back by the man next to her and could only watch as Mr Akhtar came charging from behind it, yelling and swinging the bat wildly.
‘Get the hell out. Get out.’
The white boy backed quickly away, his hand still in his pocket, while the other two turned on their heels and ran for the door, their arms reaching out to send tins and packets of cereal scattering as they went. They screamed threats and promised that they would be back and one of them shouted something about the place stinking of curry anyway.
When the last one was out on the pavement – still swearing threats and making obscene gestures – Mr Akhtar slammed the door. He fumbled in his pocket for keys and locked it, then stood with his head against the glass, breathing heavily.
Helen took a step towards him, asked if he was all right.
Outside, one of the boys kicked at the window, then hawked up a gobbet of thick spittle on to the glass. It had just begun to dribble down past the ads for gardeners, guitar teachers and massage, when he was pulled away by his friends.
‘I’m going to make a call,’ Helen said. ‘We’ve got it all on camera, so there’s nothing to worry about.’ She glanced up at the small camera above the till and realized it was almost certainly a dummy. ‘I can give good descriptions of all three of them, OK? You know I’m a police officer, so … ’
Still with his back to the shop, Mr Akhtar nodded and began fumbling in his pocket a second time.
‘Mr Akhtar?’
When he turned round, the newsagent was pointing a gun.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ the man next to Helen said.
Helen swallowed hard, tried to control the shaking in her leg and in her voice when she spoke. ‘What are you doing—?’
Mr Akhtar shouted then and swore as he told Helen and her fellow customer exactly what would happen if they did not do what he said. The curse sounded awkward in his mouth though, like something spoken by an actor who has over-rehearsed.
Like a white lie.
‘Shut up,’ he screamed. ‘Shut up or I will fucking kill you.’
‘It’s
espresso
, for crying out loud,’ Tom Thorne shouted. ‘Espresso … ’
The man – who of course could not hear him – was talking enthusiastically about how he could not even think about starting his day without that all-important hit of caffeine. He said the offending word again and Thorne slapped his hand against the steering wheel.
‘Not
ex
presso, you pillock. There’s no bloody X in it … ’
Sitting in a long line of rush-hour traffic, crawling north towards lights on Haverstock Hill, Thorne glanced right and saw a woman staring across at him from behind the wheel of a sporty-looking Mercedes. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. Muttered, ‘Sod you, then,’ when she turned away. He had hoped that, having seen him talking to himself, she might presume that he was making a hands-free call, but she clearly had him marked down as a ranting nutter.
‘I suppose that a nice strong
ex
presso gives you an
ex
pecially good start to the day, does it?’
Looking for something else,
anything
else to listen to, he stabbed at the pre-set buttons; settled eventually for something sweet and folksy, a soft, pure voice and a song he half recognised.
Shouting at the radio was probably just another sign of growing older, Thorne thought. One of the many. Up there on the list with losing a little hearing in his right ear and thinking that there was nothing worth watching on television any more. Wondering why teenagers thought it was cool to wear their trousers around their knees.
The song finished and the DJ cheerfully informed him which station he was tuned into.
Up there with listening to Radio 2!
Changes of opinion or temperament were inevitable of course, Thorne knew that, and on some days he might even admit that they were not necessarily a bad thing. When change happened gradually, its slow accretion of shifts and triggers could go almost unnoticed, but Thorne was rarely comfortable with anything that was more sudden. However necessary it might be. Too many things in his life had changed recently, or were in the process of changing, and he was still finding it hard to cope with any of them.
To adjust.
He pulled somewhat less than smoothly away from the lights, cursing as his foot slipped off the still unfamiliar accelerator pedal.
The bloody car, for a start.
He had finally traded in his beloved 1975 BMW CSi for a two-year-old 5 Series that was rather more reliable and for which he could at least obtain replacement parts when he needed them. The car had been the first and as yet only thing to go, but more major changes were imminent. His flat in Kentish Town had been on the market for a month, though he still had some repairs to do and buyers seemed thin on the ground. And, despite several weeks of quiet words and clandestine sniffing around, a suitable transfer to another squad had yet to become available.
Then there had been Louise …
All these less than comfortable shifts in Thorne’s life, important as they might seem, were secondary to that. The car, the flat, the job. The flurry of changes had come about, had been decided upon, as a direct result of what had happened with Louise.
He and Louise Porter had finally parted company a couple of months before, after a relationship that had lasted just over two years. For half that time it had been better than either of them had expected; way better than most relationships between police officers, certainly. But as a team they had not been strong enough to cope with the loss of a baby. Neither had been able to give the other the particular form of comfort they needed and, while the relationship had limped on for a while, they had suffered separately and paid heavily for it. Louise had been understandably resentful that Thorne seemed more easily able to deal with the grief of strangers, while Thorne himself had struggled with guilt at not having been quite as devastated by the miscarriage as he thought he should have been. By the time that guilt had burned itself out and Thorne was able to admit just how much he had wanted to be a father, it was too late for both of them.
They had become lovers by numbers, and in the end it had simply fizzled away. It was Louise who finally plucked up the courage to say what needed saying, but Thorne had known for a while that the break had to come, before such feelings as were left between them darkened and became destructive.
They had both kept their own flats, which made the practicalities straightforward enough. Louise had taken away a bin-liner stuffed with clothes and cosmetics from Thorne’s place in Kentish Town, while Thorne had left Louise’s flat for the last time with a carrier bag, a few tins of beer and a box of CDs. It had ended with a hug, but it might just as well have been a handshake. Loading his boxes and bags into the back of his car, Thorne had decided that it might be a good idea to change a whole lot of other things.
To start again …
He turned towards Finchley and almost immediately hit a tailback. No more than five miles now, but still half an hour or so away from Hendon, and Becke House. The headquarters of the Area West Murder Squad.
‘Why the hell do you need to change your job?’
He had been out drinking with Phil Hendricks a few weeks before, and, as always, the Mancunian had not fought shy of giving his opinion. Thorne shook his head, but had listened anyway. Hendricks’ opinion was the one he most valued professionally and the same thing usually applied when it came to his private life, because the pathologist was the nearest thing he had to a best friend.
‘Only friend,’ Hendricks never tired of saying.
‘Why not?’ Thorne had asked.
‘Because it’s not … relevant. It’s not
necessary
. It would be like me doing a post-mortem on some poor bugger who’d been shot twelve times in the head, then saying the fact he had hardened arteries and a slight heart condition might have had something to do with his death.’
‘You’re drunk,’ Thorne had said.
‘It’s too much, that’s all. Just because you’ve split up with someone doesn’t mean you have to change everything. I mean, car … yes! The bloody thing was a death-trap and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with moving to a new flat either. We’ll find you somewhere much nicer than that dump you’re in now
and
I’ll take you shopping for some decent furniture, but do you really need to be looking for a new job as well?’
‘It’s all part of it.’
‘Part of what?’
‘New start,’ Thorne said. ‘New broom … leaf, whatever.’
‘You’re drunker than I am … ’
They had moved on to football then and Thorne’s desolate sex life, but Thorne could see that Hendricks had a point, and he had thought about little else since. Even though he still believed he was doing the right thing in looking for a new challenge, the thought of leaving Area West Homicide made him feel slightly sick. The nature of the job and the politics of arse-covering meant that it was often hard to build up real trust between members of a team. Thorne had come to value the relationships he had with a number of those he worked with every day. Men and women he liked and respected. Plenty of idiots as well of course, but even so.
Better the devil you know, all that.
On the radio, Chris Evans was making him almost as angry as Expresso Man, so Thorne turned it off. He switched to CD and scanned through the ten discs he had mounted in the changer. He turned up the volume at the familiar guitar lick and that first lovely rumble of the man’s voice.
Johnny Cash: ‘Ain’t No Grave’.
‘While you’re busy changing things,’ Hendricks had said, ‘you could always do something about that stupid cowboy music.’
Thorne grinned, remembering the pained look on his friend’s face, and pushed on through the traffic towards the office.
It was not as if he was going to take the first thing that came along. Chances were nothing suitable would present itself for a good while anyway, and by the time it did he might feel differently.
For now he would just do his job, wait and see what turned up.
As Helen backed away from the gun, she could see a face at the window over Akhtar’s shoulder. One of the boys he had chased from the shop, open-mouthed at seeing what was happening inside. He shouted something to one of his friends before tearing away, down towards the station. If Akhtar heard it, he did not seem unduly concerned. He just kept walking towards Helen and the man standing next to her.
Good, Helen thought, that’s good. At least now someone on the outside will know what the situation is and will alert the police. This was provided they believed it, of course. She could barely believe what was happening herself.
Mr Akhtar
.
She could not say honestly that she knew the man, not really, but she had been coming into his shop for over a year. They’d spoken every day, no more than pleasantries, but still …
What the hell was he up to?
Pointing with the gun, Akhtar ushered Helen and the other customer around the counter and through a low archway into a cluttered storeroom behind the shop. Sitting on a battered wooden desk was a television showing
Daybreak
with the sound turned down. There was a single chair, a filing cabinet and a small fridge in the corner with a kettle, some mugs and a jar of coffee on top. Aside from a small sink, almost every inch of space on three of the walls was taken up with cardboard boxes and stacked plastic pallets containing replacement stock.
Tinned goods, crisps, kitchen towel, cigarettes.
There were two doors. The one with bolts top and bottom and a heavy padlock was clearly an exterior door which Helen presumed opened out on to the alleyway that ran along the back of the shops. She guessed that the unpainted plywood door led to a toilet.
Akhtar said he was sorry that things were a little cramped and told them to stand against the one bare wall. He asked Helen if she had a mobile phone. She told him it was in her handbag. He told her to slide the bag across the floor towards him and told the man to slowly do the same with his mobile phone. Then, once he had taken a seat at the desk, he ordered them both to sink down on to their backsides. Without taking his eyes from them, he rooted around in one of the desk drawers before tossing two pairs of metal handcuffs across to Helen.
‘Off the internet,’ he said. ‘Top of the range. Same as the ones you use, I think.’
Helen reached across and picked the cuffs up from the floor. ‘It’s not too late to stop this,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is you’re doing, things are not too serious yet, OK? I mean I can’t say for sure you’ll stay out of prison, because of the gun, but if you let us go now I’ll do everything I can to make sure that it’s not too bad. Are you listening, Mr Akhtar?’
He smiled at Helen, a little oddly. Said, ‘I would like you to handcuff one another to the radiator pipes. There is one at either end, see?’
Helen exchanged a look with the man slumped next to her, and nodded. She reached across and cuffed his right hand to the small pipe that ran down into the floor. When she had finished, though it had now become somewhat awkward and took rather longer, he did the same to her left hand.