by Chris Ryan
‘Gotcha,’ the young man said finally.
‘What do you have?’
‘Well . . .’ said the fingerprint technician, relaxing a little, clearly enjoying his moment in the sun. ‘You’re lucky we’ve got him, to be honest. It’s only because he had a break-in back in 2008. SOCOs dusted him off just to eliminate his prints from the crime scene. Clean as a whistle otherwise. But what did he say his name was?’
‘Sarmed Ashe,’ Eva breathed.
‘Tch tch tch . . .’ tutted the technician, nodding. ‘Giving false ID to a prison officer. Naughty boy. ’Fraid that’s not his real name.’
‘What is?’
‘He’s actually called Hussein Al-Samara. Let’s have a look. Iraqi born. Granted political asylum 9 November 2001 – that’s, like, nearly two months to the day after 9/11, right?’
‘Right,’ Eva breathed.
‘Naturalized 15 December 2006 . . . I suppose you want his address?’
Eva tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Print it out for me, would you?’
Ten minutes later, and clutching a single piece of paper, she was once more nodding at the security guy at ground-floor reception, before striding out of the Yard and wondering to herself whether she would ever set foot in that place again.
0700 hours.
Joe was wearing black jeans, a tight grey polo neck, a black woollen hat and a thick, checked lumberjack shirt. It had taken him two hours to find a charity shop where someone had left a black plastic bag of donated clothes in the doorway. These were the best-fitting, and warmest, items he could find. But anything was better than the dirty prison uniform that he had rolled into a bundle and chucked into a big metal catering dustbin at the back of an Indian restaurant on Tooting High Street. With one of the £50 notes he’d taken from Eva’s place, he’d bought himself hot, sweet tea and two platefuls of shepherd’s pie from an all-night café. It tasted disgusting – even the food in Barfield had been better than this – but he needed fuel and he wolfed it down. Just to get hot food inside him felt fantastic.
On the other side of the road was another all-night establishment. Posters in the window advertised the ability to wire money to any country in minutes, cheap phone calls to Nigeria and Delhi and internet access at £1 for twenty minutes. Three men – Turkish? he wondered – loitered by a counter, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from tiny cups. A fourth man, slightly older, stood behind it. They’d gone silent as Joe entered, and given him an unfriendly stare. He had just pointed at one of the computer screens, received a nod from the man behind the counter, and taken a seat. It took him five minutes to set up the Hotmail accounts using a false name and address. As soon as he was done, he’d walked up to the counter and handed over a fifty-pound note. The proprietor had taken it into a back room to get change while the three men moved over to a nearby table to continue their conversation in their own language, leaving their cigarette packets, keys and smartphones in plain view.
Joe’s plan was executed almost as quickly as it was formulated. He had surreptitiously removed the smartphone from the middle pile as he leaned over it, depositing it in the left-hand pocket of his lumberjack shirt. Seconds later the man had reappeared with his change. Joe had grunted a word of thanks, left the shop and hurried down the road before his act was discovered. Once he had turned off the main road, he’d switched off the phone and removed the battery. A mobile, he knew, was as good as a tracking device. But if anyone was going to track him, it needed to be on his terms . . .
The first Tube to Waterloo had left Tooting Broadway at 5.53 a.m. He bought himself a tin of Tennent’s Super from a local Spar, poured half of it away and sat at the end of the Northern Line carriage, head bowed, eyes half closed but still alert, the beer can that instantly marked him out as a wino to be avoided held lightly between his knees. As he’d hoped, the few bleary-eyed commuters on the carriage kept their distance and avoided eye contact. There are ways of being invisible, Joe understood. This was one.
Joe’s carriage on the train from Waterloo to Epsom was almost empty. Few people travelled out of London at this hour. He stared through the window, watching the suburban gardens whizz past . . . allotments . . . high streets . . . , churches. So much normality. It felt alien to him. A copy of the Metro freesheet was on the floor by his feet. He picked it up and opened a page at random. He stared blankly at the drawing that took up half a page for a good five seconds before he realized what he was looking at: an artist’s impression of the compound in Abbottabad, with images of crashed helicopters and arrows representing troop movements. In a sudden fit of anger he screwed the paper up and threw it back onto the floor. He figured that the world would suddenly be full of experts on what had happened that night.
He stepped out of the train at Epsom just as the Tannoy announced the arrival of the 08.32 to Waterloo. The platform was busy, but Joe’s can of lager did the trick as the harried commuters walking in the opposite direction separated to let him pass. Minutes later he was walking south through the residential area of Epsom. He knew his route. He had walked it often enough with Caitlin and Conor. His father-in-law, or whatever you wanted to call him, lived alone in a quiet road ten minutes’ walk from the station. But he knew something was wrong before he’d even walked for half that time.
These streets were always lined with parked cars, but they were seldom busy. This morning they were gridlocked. Drivers were performing tight three-point turns to get out of the solid, unmoving traffic, which only made matters worse. Several had got out of their cars and were looking ahead, trying to see the cause of the blockage.
Joe, though, realized what it was the moment he turned left into Mr O’Donnell’s street.
There were no sirens, just the ominous blue and white flashing of four emergency vehicles – one ambulance, three police – stationed in the middle of the road. They were thirty metres from Joe’s position. Midway between them and him was a police cordon, delineated by a strip of fluorescent tape and with three uniformed officers on duty. Ten metres from the cordon a four-man TV crew had set up a camera in the road and were standing beside it: two smoking, two drinking coffee, looking bored and clearly waiting for something newsworthy to happen.
The cordon, the camera crew, the blocked-off street: these were the cause of the traffic jam. They were also the cause of Joe’s sudden nausea. He didn’t even need to check that the emergency vehicles were positioned outside Caitlin’s father’s house.
It was all he could do to resist the urge simply to barge through the cordon. What the fuck had happened? Conor? Was he . . .
Suddenly his pulse was racing, his breath short. If he’d lost Conor, he’d lost everything. He ran towards the camera crew. Before he knew what had happened, the camera itself was lying smashed on the ground and he had grabbed one of the team by the front of his coat and was bellowing: ‘What’s happening here? What the fuck’s going on?’
He felt arms behind him – the rest of the crew were pulling him away. He made short work of them, jabbing one in the chest with the heel of his right hand, swiping another away with his arm like he was barely there. It didn’t matter that they’d done nothing. Rage was burning inside him like he’d never known it.
From the edge of his vision, he was aware of two police officers – one male, one female – sprinting towards him from the cordon. The male officer was shouting something – in his confused state, he couldn’t tell what – and the woman was talking into the radio attached to her uniform.
He stared at them for a second, breathless, teeth clenched.
And then he ran.
There was more shouting behind him. Someone was making chase. Joe hurtled round the corner of the street, running blindly but with all the speed he could muster. Sweat poured from him. His muscles burned. He didn’t know where he was heading. He just had to get away, out of sight. He had no thought for himself, but only for Conor. He had to know what had happened. He had to speak to Eva. She would be able to fi
nd out . . .
He was in an alleyway behind a terrace of Victorian houses. He didn’t know how he’d got there. It was quiet. A bold urban fox stared at him from ten metres away, but apart from that he was alone, standing by three green wheelie bins overflowing with stinking rubbish bags. He crouched down between two of them, making sure he was fully out of sight in case anyone should appear at either end of the alley. With trembling, fumbling hands he removed the stolen phone from his lumberjack shirt, replaced the battery and switched it on.
Ten seconds passed. The screen lit up with an animated Nokia logo. The service bars were half full, the data coverage good. He quickly opened the browser and directed it to the Hotmail homepage. After pulling out the scrap of paper with the email addresses he’d created, his calloused fingers tapped in the details on the touchscreen. In an instant he was staring at two emails in his inbox: one welcoming him to Hotmail, the other from the second address he had created. From Eva.
He tapped it and read the message that appeared: ‘The visitor’s name is Hussein Al-Samara. Address: Flat B, 23 Wimborne Road, Dagenham. There’s a cafe directly opposite. I’m there now. E’.
Joe could feel the return of the anger that had just made him lose control. He didn’t know who this Hussein Al-Samara was, but he knew he wanted to fuck the guy up. And if he knew anything – anything – ?about Conor . . .
Joe acted with sudden clarity. He had stolen this phone for a reason. If someone was searching for him – someone with resources – there was a chance they were monitoring access to his regular email account. If he accessed it from this phone, they could start tracing it. But it would be a moment’s work to leave the handset under the seat of a bus and set his pursuers on a wild goose chase . . .
He didn’t hesitate. Logging out of his new account, he typed in the username and password of his old one. Ten seconds passed while the connection was made. His inbox appeared.
There was a long list of unread emails. The usual shit: loan offers, porn sites and Viagra. Joe paid no attention to any of them. At the top of the list was an email from an address he did not recognize, but with a subject heading that he certainly did: ‘Conor’.
He felt, as he lightly tapped the screen, that the world had slowed down. It seemed to take an age for the email to display. When it did, and he tapped on the link that formed its only contents, the delay was excruciating.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. A YouTube video appeared on the phone’s screen. No title. Number of views: 0.
Joe tapped the screen to play it. He saw dark, juddery camerawork. A time code read ‘06:03’. There were clunking noises, and then perhaps, very faintly, a whimpering sound.
A child’s voice. Full of fear.
The camera swung round. There was a window. Beyond it, he thought he could make out the sea. The sky was growing light, but there was no sign of the rising sun. It continued to move. He saw a bed. On the wall behind it there was a picture of a sailing ship in stormy seas.
And, sitting on the bed, was his son.
Conor’s face was beaten and bruised. There was a cut on his lower lip, and a daub of blood just below it. His eyes were raw and swollen. His hands were tied behind his back.
He tried to speak, but couldn’t. All that came from his mouth was a weak, shuddering sound. But then he looked up, clearly paying attention to whoever was holding the video camera. Whatever sign that person made, it seemed to fill Conor with more horror.
Finally he spoke. Each word was an effort. He stuttered and stumbled, and it sounded more like weeping than speaking. The message, though, was sufficiently clear.
‘Daddy . . . I don’t know where I am . . . Mr . . . Mr Ashe . . . He killed granddad . . . He says he’s going to kill me . . .’
The very second he had forced these feeble words from his terrified throat, the screen went black. The video was over.
With dread creeping through every cell of his body, Joe stared at the empty screen. And when he tried to replay the scene, he was unable. Instead of his beaten, terrorized son, he saw a brief message: a message that chilled him almost as much as what he had just seen.
‘Video unavailable,’ it said. ‘The owner has removed this content.’
The full cup of coffee on the table in front of Eva was cold, the toast uneaten, the Daily Mirror unread. She had no stomach for either food or news.
She had chosen a seat by the front window. It looked directly onto the pavement and the busy street just off Dagenham Heathway. And on the other side of the road, the black door of number 23. Her eyes were stuck on it. If a lorry or a bus passed – which they did frequently – she had to suppress brief surges of panic. If the mysterious Hussein Al-Samara – or Mr Ashe, or whatever he wanted to call himself – came in or out of the premises, she needed to know about it. Joe would ask her what she had seen when – if – he arrived, and she wanted his approval. Given the events of the last twelve hours, there wasn’t much else that seemed important.
She checked her watch: 09.48. Had Joe read her email? How long should she wait for him to arrive? All day? The café was full and the middle-aged Greek woman who had supplied her coffee and toast was eyeing her from behind the counter, obviously peeved that she was taking up a table that other customers might want.
Her eyes panned up to the first-floor window. Flat B. Was that Al-Samara’s place? The wooden frame looked rotten, the pane was covered with a net curtain. A faint glow suggested that a light was on inside.
‘You finished?’
Eva looked up. The woman from behind the counter was looking down at the uneaten food like it was a personal slight.
‘Yeah . . .’ she muttered. ‘Thanks . . .’ Her eyes wandered back to number 23. ‘Um . . . maybe I’ll have another . . .’
She’d seen movement in the first-floor window. The net curtain fluttered slightly. She thought maybe she’d seen a shadow passing it.
‘. . . coffee,’ she breathed. The woman cleared her table.
Eva’s phone rang. She answered it immediately. ‘Joe?’ she said, before remembering that he didn’t even have her number.
‘DI Buckley?’ A voice she half recognized.
‘Who’s this?’ There was a tremor in her voice.
‘Jason Riley, Scotland Yard.’
She didn’t answer.
‘You came to see me this morning? In the basement? It’s about the fingerprint ID I gave you . . .’
‘What about it?’ she breathed.
‘Well, I was just logging the query and something came up. There were two other male visitors on the day in question and their fingerprint records are all the same.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Identical prints, all of them. Same bloke, this Hussein Al-Samara. Don’t know how they did it, but it looks to me like someone’s been tampering with the records. I’ll need to refer this upwards, but I thought I’d just give you the nod—’
‘Shit!’
Eva let the phone drop from her ear. The fingerprint technician’s words were bad enough, but her view of the first-floor window of number 23 was even worse. The shadow had suddenly reappeared, but this time it had slammed against both the net curtain and the window pane, and a crack had suddenly appeared in the glass. ‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God, Joe – what are you doing?’
She stood up immediately, pushing past the waitress.
‘You haven’t paid!’ the woman shouted. Eva threw a note on the table without even checking what it was, before running out onto the street and straight across the busy road. Within seconds she was at the black door, pressing desperately, repeatedly on the buzzer for Flat B. It made no sound, but she pressed and pressed, thumping on the wooden door with her other hand.
Two minutes passed. Three. There was no response from Flat B. With a howl of frustration, Eva stepped back onto the pavement and cursed, before stepping up to the door once more and pressing the button for Flat A. It was answered within seconds.
‘Police,’ she bellowed into
the intercom. ‘Open up.’
There was a clicking sound. Eva pushed the door open and hurtled inside.
She found herself in a square lobby with grey ceramic floor tiles and on one side a row of pigeonholes for mail. There was a door to her left, which opened to reveal a frightened-looking old lady in a dressing gown and hairnet.
‘Flat B?’ Eva demanded.
‘Upstairs . . .’ The old lady nodded at a staircase with a wrought-iron banister. Eva ran towards it, but then stopped and looked back. ‘Is there a rear entrance to these flats?’
The old lady nodded, but then frowned. ‘Do you have any identification?’
Eva didn’t answer. She ran to the old lady’s door and pushed past her into the ground-floor flat. Ignoring the feeble shouts of protest, she ran along the dark hallway and into the tiny kitchen at the end, where a door looked out onto an alleyway from which an external iron staircase zigzagged up. She yanked the door open – a wailing sound reached her ears from above – and flew up the staircase to the first floor.
It was no surprise to see that the back door of Flat B was swinging open.
The bigger surprise was the baby, no more than three months old, lying in a Moses basket on the kitchen table, screaming its lungs out.
Eva ran past it, heading for the room at the front. She could hear more shouting from in there. Then she saw why.
There were three people in the room. One of them was a woman, short, dumpy, Middle Eastern-looking, wearing a tightly wrapped green headscarf. She was kneeling in the far-left corner of the room, just beyond a tatty sofa, her hands clutched in front of her, her face stained with tears, her eyes full of terror.
