Thorne slowed to fifty around the one-way system at the southern corner of Battersea Park, then let the needle climb as he followed the Latchmere Road towards Clapham. The rain had worsened. Through the beating wipers, the brake lights and indicators of the vehicles in front were no more than smears of orange and red.
‘You were probably putting it together before the trial had even finished,’ Thorne said. ‘The perfect three-part solution to your awkward little problem and the three perfect people to carry out the plan. Yes? Had it all worked out by the end of the first day, I reckon.’ Another quick glance across at his passenger got no response. He shrugged. Thorne had never done a high-speed driving course and he told Prosser as much, then winced as he put his foot down and took the car across a busy junction on red.
‘Jesus,’ Prosser whispered.
‘Once you’ve put Amin away for as long as you can get away with, it’s just a question of making sure he gets sent to the right place. So that’s where our friend Mr Powell at the Youth Justice Board comes in. He’s the only one of the three musketeers I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet, but it won’t be long because he’ll have been picked up by now. Probably sitting in an interview room next door to Dr McCarthy, while my sergeant takes bets on which one of them is going to start blubbering and shooting off his mouth first …
‘Who would your money be on?’
Prosser’s eyes were closed, the skin tight around his mouth.
‘So … your friend Powell allocates Amin to Barndale, which conveniently happens to be the Young Offenders Institution where your mutual friend Dr McCarthy is the chief medical officer. Which means you can
watch
him. Because that’s really what it’s all about. Keeping an eye on the boy, making sure he says nothing, does nothing. Making sure there’s one of you on the spot if he so much as hints at the fact that he sussed you out in that courtroom and knows exactly what the three of you get up to in your spare time.
‘And it works. It all works very nicely until the boy decides he wants to do some course which isn’t available at Barndale, which means he needs to be transferred. Which means you won’t be able to watch him any more. Powell tries to block it, but the governor insists because he’s trying to do the best thing for Amin … and now you’re in trouble. So, you decide to do what you would probably have done later on anyway when it was time for Amin to move into an adult prison. That’s when you give McCarthy his orders and he puts a nice little plan of his own together with a couple of boys who are happy to earn some money before they get out. That’s when he gives Jonathan Bridges a syringe.
‘That’s when you actually had Amin Akhtar killed,’ Thorne said. ‘But he was as good as dead the moment he walked into your courtroom, wasn’t he?’
Prosser shifted in his seat and looked at Thorne. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘Got what?’
‘The name of that lawyer,’ Prosser said. ‘He’s expensive, but it’ll be worth it just to see you reduced to helping old ladies across the road.’
Thorne’s knuckles whitened on the wheel and he nudged the Passat up to eighty on the long, straight road that crossed Clapham Common. Fifty yards ahead, a pedestrian beneath an umbrella was hesitating at a zebra crossing and though the lights and the siren were still going, Thorne leaned on the horn for good measure.
‘Do you know what’s really ironic?’ Thorne asked. ‘I don’t think Amin would ever have said anything, because he didn’t
know
anything. The simple, stupid fact is he didn’t recognise you. You were just another punter he wanted to forget as quickly as possible. He never said a word to McCarthy, he never said a word to his long-term boyfriend at Barndale, he never said a word to anybody. He was just a seventeen-year-old boy keeping his head down and trying to do his time. He wasn’t even the one that took that bloody photograph! I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure if you and your friends knew that photo existed, but even if you did … even if it was one more reason why you thought you should get rid of Amin Akhtar, you got your Asian rent boys mixed up. Easily done, I appreciate that. You got the
wrong Paki
.’
‘Oh for pity’s sake—’
‘You didn’t need to kill him.’
Thorne blasted across the South Circular and pointed the car towards Brixton Hill. They were no more than a few minutes away.
‘Where are we going anyway?’ Prosser asked. ‘You know exactly where we’re going,’ Thorne said. ‘Thing is, I’ve never been a big believer in the whole restorative justice thing, but some people genuinely believe that when the perpetrator and the victim … or in this case the victim’s family … come face to face, it can be hugely beneficial for both parties. On top of which, statistics suggest that it lowers the chances that the perpetrator will reoffend. Not really an issue as far as you’re concerned, obviously.’
‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘You should,’ Prosser said. ‘Because you don’t have a great deal left. Not at your current pay grade anyway.’
Thorne turned to look hard at the judge for a few seconds longer than was strictly safe, all things considered. Long enough to see the blood begin to drain from Prosser’s face. Then he turned his eyes back to the road. ‘Listen, we’ve already established that Powell and McCarthy aren’t very likely to tough it out and there’s certainly no reason why either of them would want to do you any favours. Your two
co-defendants
, and I’m calling them that because that’s what they’re going to be soon enough, will roll over as quickly as one of those party boys when a punter starts waving his wallet around. So, my advice would be that you seriously consider your position at this point. Because, other than every effort I can possibly make to ensure you don’t get within a hundred miles of a Vulnerable Prisoner unit, and that every hard case on your wing knows exactly who you are and which of their friends and relations, if any, you’ve put away … I really don’t see what else you’ve got to gain by being such a smartarse. Your honour.’
Prosser nodded, mock-impressed. ‘Excellent speech, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if you were to put that much effort in when you’re giving evidence, a few less scumbags would get off.’
‘One less will do for now,’ Thorne said.
‘They tried to give me an epidural when I was giving birth to Alfie, but they couldn’t get the needle in and in the end it was like I just
screamed
him out.’ Helen’s fists were clenched as she remembered, her jaw tight as she lived through the agony again, but something soft all the same around her eyes. ‘The pain felt pretty good in the end, can you understand that?’
Akhtar nodded.
‘It felt honest. Like it was the only honest thing I had felt in a long time. It felt
earned
.’ She took a breath and stretched out her fingers, used one to dam the tears just for a second.
‘And he was … perfect, you know? Whatever, whoever had made him, he was just this perfect little boy and it made everything else, all the horrible things and the hurtful things, seem unimportant. So I just got on with it. I found a new flat, and it was just the two of us twenty-four hours a day, and sometimes I’d look right into his eyes and I’d tell him he looked just like his dad. I’d be telling myself he was Paul’s, because I wanted it so much. Because he had to be. Because that would be the fairest thing. Telling myself or telling other people that he had Paul’s nose or his mannerisms or whatever else, and it was nothing but a lovely, stupid lie, because there’d be other times when I’d look at him and he looked nothing like Paul at all.
‘When he wasn’t so perfect.’
She reached across to rub at the wrist of her left hand, where the handcuff had taken away the skin. It had become a tic. ‘There’s other people that know. My sister and my dad. They know what happened and they know it was just before I got pregnant, and I know damn well they’ve wondered about who Alfie’s father was. But nobody says anything. They just carry on as if I’ve got a husband or a boyfriend who’s working in another country or something, or else my sister’s trying to get me fixed up with some sad case that nobody else wants.’ She shrugged, and for just a moment there was the hint of laughter, somewhere low in her throat. ‘Nobody ever … talks about Paul. Only very occasionally, when they forget themselves or one of my sister’s kids says something and even then it’s like he’s just some private joke. Like he’s somebody I’ve made up. That’s what makes everything so much worse … that hateful, pathetic fear of embarrassment, of saying something awkward, and I’m just as bad as they are, because I’m too embarrassed to tell them how shitty and awful it’s making me feel. To tell them that sometimes it seems as if Paul can’t possibly be Alfie’s dad, because he was never there at all.
‘I’m scared,’ she said, quietly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Akhtar said.
‘No, not just about all this. I’m scared about what I’m going to say to my son when he’s old enough to want to know who his father was. I’m scared to find out the truth.’
Akhtar looked at her. ‘There is some way to find out?’
‘Paul was a copper, same as me. So his DNA’s on record. I could get a test done, but I don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t the right result.’
‘Would it really be so bad?’
‘I know there are worse things.’ She looked at him. ‘I know there are, but second to anything happening to Alfie, this would be my worst thing.’
‘Thorne told me yesterday that I should prepare myself for the truth,’ Akhtar said. ‘He told me that it might not be particularly pleasant. Well, I can only say to you what I said to him. You have suffered, same as I have, and you must surely realise that the truth, however unpleasant, cannot compare to that sort of pain. That it can only make things more bearable in the long run.’ He stood up slowly. ‘Ignorance is not bliss, Helen. Trust me on that. Ignorance is torment.’ He took a few steps towards the shop, then stopped and cocked his head towards the sound of a siren that was quickly growing louder.
Less than ten feet from where Javed Akhtar was standing – outside, on the rutted, overgrown path that snaked from a crumbling block of garages to the rear of the premises – Chivers was watching as his method-of-entry specialist knelt in the mud and carefully laid the last of the explosive charges at the base of the back door.
Five minutes from a ‘go’.
Once the charges were in position, Chivers would brief each member of his team once more on the action plan. Each would have a specific function to carry out. One that would hopefully last no more than a few seconds, but which would prove crucial as part of a six-man operation and upon which their own lives as well as the lives of those in the building would depend.
The ballistic shield officer.
The baton officer.
The ‘cover’ officer.
The prison reception officer, responsible for handling the hostage taker until such time as he could be taken into custody.
The dog handler.
Following that final briefing, there would be a last-minute equipment check. Helmets, goggles, earplugs and body armour. All rifles, handguns and Tasers. The CS canisters and the 8-Bang stun grenades designed to create as much noise and chaos as possible, to distract and disorient the hostage taker in those first few seconds after breaching had been effected. A faulty bit of kit would always be a firearms officer’s worst nightmare and with good reason. Chivers firmly believed that his men had been well trained and that equipment failure was far more likely than any human error.
Sadly, the same could not be said for others on the operation. There would certainly be an inquiry into why it had taken a trained hostage negotiator the best part of two days to notice that one of her hostages was dead.
Chivers doubted he’d be seeing DS Susan Pascoe again.
He had not even been aware of the siren until it became clear that it was somewhere very close. He immediately moved back towards the garages, well away from the earshot of anyone behind the door and called Donnelly on the radio.
‘What’s happening, Mike?’
‘I don’t believe this.’
The rain was noisy against his helmet, his body armour. ‘Say again.’
‘He’s come right through the fucking cordon, almost took out a couple of the uniforms.’
‘Who?’
‘Thorne. Listen, Bob, you’d better hold off for the time being and get yourself and your lads back round to the front … ’
As Thorne got out of the car and jogged around to the passenger side, he was forced to shield his eyes against the glare from a cluster of powerful arc lights that had been arranged on the pavement opposite the shop. In front of them was a line of emergency vehicles – ARVs, ambulances, rapid response cars – behind which the CO19 officers had taken up their firing positions earlier on.
Thorne’s phone began to ring, but he knew very well who was calling.
He opened the door and dragged Prosser out. The light, bouncing back from the metal shutters of Akhtar’s shop, washed across the judge’s face, worsened its already sickly pallor. Thorne pushed him back against the side of the car. He pressed the flat of one hand hard into Prosser’s chest, then answered his phone with the other.
‘Mike.’
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’ve got what Akhtar wanted, so you can stand the CO19 boys down.’
‘Who’s that with you?’
Thorne guessed that Donnelly and the rest of the team were gathered in the TSU vehicle, watching him on the monitors that carried the CCTV feed. He squinted up through the rain and stared straight at the camera mounted high on a lamppost on the opposite side of the road. ‘This is the man who killed Akhtar’s son,’ he said. ‘Who
arranged
for him to be killed.’ He turned back to Prosser and looked him in the eye. ‘He’s the reason we’re all here.’
‘You need to move away from the shop, Tom.’
‘I’m taking him inside,’ Thorne said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It makes about as much sense as sending Chivers and his mates in.’