Love Like Blood

by Mark Billingham

  Not her at all.

  ‘So, he wanted to be with her, like who wouldn’t? But he knew his old man wouldn’t be over the moon about it, so he told me that if they had to, they were going to disappear. Abroad even, if it came to that. Said he’d let me know where they were, once they were settled.’ He looked at Thorne. ‘I haven’t heard anything yet, if you were wondering.’

  Thorne took a serviette and wiped his fingers. He said, ‘Did Kamal ever say anything that made you think he was worried, or scared about anything?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like someone was watching him.’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Did he ever say anything about anyone following him?’

  Danny shook his head. ‘He told me his girlfriend’s brother was a bit of a nutcase, but I think that was more about her than it was about Kamal, you know?’

  Thorne reached for another chicken wing. ‘OK.’

  ‘What do you mean, following him? Why would anyone be following Kamal?’

  ‘I’m not saying that anyone was.’

  ‘You think something’s happened?’

  ‘We’re just checking out all sorts of things, that’s all.’ Thorne looked at the boy. ‘Just questions I’ve got to ask.’ He nodded down at his food. ‘These are good. You do them?’

  Danny said, ‘I’m on the burgers.’

  ‘Maybe I should have had one of those,’ Thorne said. ‘Anyway, we’re about done. Oh, and tell your boss if he tries to dock your wages I’ll have the Food Standards Agency up his arse, OK?’

  As he was standing up, Danny hesitated. He said, ‘He’s just getting himself and his girlfriend settled, then he’ll call me, yeah?’

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ Thorne said.

  ‘He’s my best mate, you know?’

  Thorne watched Danny Mirza walk back to the kitchen. He decided to stay and finish his last few wings, before driving to Barnet College where he was due to meet up with Tanner. He quickly wiped his fingers again when his phone rang and he saw Brigstocke’s name on the screen. He wondered what on earth he could have done to upset his boss when he had only been on the case twenty-four hours, then reminded himself that he had managed it several times before.

  ‘I’ve had Lambeth on the phone,’ Brigstocke said.

  ‘Right.’ The Forensic Science Laboratory. The standard call to let them know the DNA sample had yielded no results.

  ‘You’re a lucky so-and-so, Tom. You push to get Kitson taken off it so that you can step in and next day, bang, you get a DNA match. Yvonne’s going to be spitting feathers.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ Thorne stood up and walked towards the door. This was something Tanner would want to hear as soon as possible.

  ‘It’s not all good news, though. I mean not as far as your theory’s concerned, anyway. Tanner’s theory.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The DNA from the semen sample is a match for Kamal Azim.’

  Thorne said nothing. He had been about to start telling Brigstocke that there had to have been a mistake, but then he remembered that Kamal had been arrested three months before. The drunk and disorderly outside a nightclub. A DNA sample would have been taken then as a matter of routine. There was nothing he could say. He had argued with his boss any number of times, would have done so again had he felt it was remotely worthwhile. But there was no arguing with DNA.

  ‘So, we really need to up the search for Kamal Azim, right?’ Brigstocke said. ‘I know he’s not the prime suspect you were expecting, Tom, but you can’t choose them any more than you can choose your cases.’

  Thorne pushed through the door on to the street. ‘Right,’ he said. It had started to rain and umbrellas were going up around him as he walked towards his car.

  Barnet College was only twenty minutes away.

  Twenty minutes to process the news and to work out how the hell he was going to break it to Nicola Tanner.

  SEVENTEEN

  She was waiting for him outside the entrance to the college, grim-faced beneath a black umbrella she did not offer to share. Her expression darkened further when he told her about the call from Brigstocke.

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe it does.’ Thorne turned away slightly so that the rain was at his back. ‘We don’t really know what kind of kid Kamal Azim is, do we? We’re just making assumptions about him based on what we know about his parents. We’ve just been presuming he’s a nice lad because we’ve been presuming he’s a victim. So, maybe he and Amaya haven’t had sex yet. Maybe he’s desperate to do it and she doesn’t want to and maybe he gets aggressive.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ Tanner looked at him. ‘What about the men on the train? The men in that CCTV footage?’

  ‘We know Kamal had sex with her,’ Thorne said. ‘We have to ask the question.’

  ‘What if he had sex with Amaya before they were snatched?’

  ‘On the train?’ Thorne saw the distaste on Tanner’s face, the frustration and the anger, before she turned away. ‘Look, I’m just running through the conversation I’m going to be having with my boss, OK? When I’m standing there like I don’t know what “DNA match” means and I’m trying to persuade him that I shouldn’t be trying to find Kamal Azim even though it looks very much like he raped and strangled his girlfriend.’

  ‘You won’t find him.’

  Dead or on the run, Thorne knew that Tanner was probably right. Neither of them spoke for half a minute, until Tanner said ‘There’ and Thorne turned to see a young girl coming out through the glass doors at the front of the college. She raised the hood of a bright green sports top and looked around.

  Tanner waved and the girl hurried over.

  ‘Sarah?’

  The girl nodded. ‘You the one I talked to on the phone?’

  Tanner produced her warrant card, then gave Thorne a look that prompted him to produce his.

  ‘Can we get out of the rain?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Good idea,’ Tanner said. ‘Any thoughts?’

  The girl nodded towards the pancake house on the other side of the road.

  Tanner and Thorne ordered coffee, while Sarah Webster asked for pancakes with chocolate sauce. ‘These were Amaya’s favourite,’ she said. ‘We used to come in here all the time and she’d always end up eating half of mine. Never put a pound on mind you, flukey cow.’

  The girl looked as if she could do with gaining a few pounds herself. She had short blonde hair and a rash of spots around her mouth. One ear was lined with studs and the lip-ring was one Phil Hendricks would have been proud of.

  ‘Did Amaya talk about life at home much?’ Tanner’s notebook was open on the table in front of her.

  ‘Yeah, a bit.’ The girl licked chocolate sauce from her knife. ‘I mean, it wasn’t hard to see why she preferred being at college, you know?’

  ‘How strict were her parents?’

  ‘Well, they’re a damn sight stricter than mine, but it’s the religious thing, isn’t it? My mum couldn’t really care less what I get up to and that’s not great either, but I’d rather have that than be told what I can wear and who I can be with and stuff. I think I’d rather be ignored than controlled. She had to sneak out of the house and hide clothes and all that. She had to lie about where she was going. Well, she said she was with me, didn’t she? The night she went missing.’

  ‘She asked you to cover for her.’

  Sarah nodded, spooned a large piece of her pancake into her mouth. ‘Had her dad on the phone the next day, didn’t we? Screaming and swearing at my mum, calling her all sorts, like it was her fault.’

  ‘Were they ever violent towards her? Amaya’s mother and father?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but her brother was the one she was afraid of. He might have got nasty a few times. I can’t remember any bruises or anything like that, but she was off ill quite a lot. So…’

  Tanner glanced at Thorne. He drank his coffee, happy enough to let her
ask the questions.

  These questions.

  ‘Did she ever tell you that she was frightened about anything in particular?’

  ‘She was frightened most of the time,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Did she ever mention being followed?’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘Did she ever mention seeing two men? Maybe outside the college or watching her house.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, but like I said it was her brother she was most scared of. He turned up at the college once or twice. Keeping an eye on her, you know? We were sitting in here one day and she pointed him out, standing on the other side of the road just staring at us.’ She stopped eating and looked at Tanner. ‘You think he’s hurt her?’

  ‘Right now, we don’t know what’s happened,’ Tanner said.

  ‘She’s run away, right?’ The girl waited, then began nodding when she didn’t receive an answer. ‘I mean she told me that her and Kamal had been talking about it. They wanted to get married and she said running away together was something they’d have to do if their parents reacted badly.’

  ‘You think they would have?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know much about Kamal’s family, but by the sound of it hers certainly would have.’

  Thorne put his coffee down and looked at Tanner before leaning towards Sarah Webster. He said, ‘Is there any reason why Kamal would have wanted to hurt her?’

  The girl stopped eating and stared at him as though he’d suddenly begun speaking in a foreign language. ‘Kamal?’

  Thorne was aware that, next to him, Tanner was putting her notebook away. He kept his eyes on the girl. ‘Is there?’

  ‘Why the hell would there be?’

  ‘Sorry… I know this is difficult, but is there anything Amaya ever said that would lead you to believe he might hurt her sexually?’

  Sarah looked like she’d bitten into something sour.

  ‘We do have a reason for asking,’ Thorne said.

  ‘No way.’ Sarah shook her head. ‘Kamal could never have hurt her. They loved each other to bits.’

  Thorne could feel Tanner’s eyes on him. ‘OK. Again, sorry for asking… but were Amaya and Kamal having a sexual relationship?’

  The girl laughed and looked down at her plate.

  ‘Right.’ Thorne nodded. ‘They’re eighteen. Of course they were.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand.’ She looked up. ‘It wasn’t like that. Yeah, they loved each other and everything, but he was her best friend. He wasn’t her boyfriend, not like that.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Sarah Webster grinned and folded her arms, staring at Thorne and Tanner as though they were idiots.

  She said, ‘Kamal’s gay.’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Muldoon said. ‘Just because you always do the driving, why should you be the one who picks what we listen to on the radio?’

  Riaz said nothing, his eyes on the house.

  ‘What’s this racket anyway?’

  ‘It’s Sabina Yasmin,’ Riaz said.

  ‘Oh well, in that case.’

  ‘She’s one of the great Bengali singers. Maybe the greatest.’

  Muldoon shook his head, let it fall back. ‘What’s she wailing about, anyway?’

  ‘She’s singing about the fact that she can’t be with the man she loves.’

  Muldoon laughed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ironic, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  Though they were parked, Riaz had left the engine running so that the car would stay warm. He flicked the wiper stalk once to clear the film of drizzle that was beginning to impede their view. He took a drink from a bottle of water then put the bottle back into the cup holder.

  ‘Why can’t she be with him?’ Muldoon asked.

  Riaz grunted.

  ‘Why can’t she be with the man she loves? In the song?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Riaz snapped.

  ‘I just think it’s weird, that’s all. Like, you can have something like that in a song, but not in real life. In a film or whatever, you get to sing about it, with thousands of those stupid dancers or whatever, but in real life you get the likes of us turning up. Funny, that’s all.’

  Riaz said nothing. He leaned forward as a car drove slowly past, then back again as it accelerated away.

  ‘Bollywood, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Them films with all the singing and dancing.’

  Riaz nodded.

  ‘All a bit stupid, don’t you reckon? I mean, it would be nice just for once to have the odd one of them that was a bit more… realistic, all I’m saying. Like a film about the sort of thing you and me do.’ He nodded, smiling. ‘Now, that’d be something worth seeing, don’t you think?’ He waited, but Riaz showed no inclination to tell him what he thought. ‘I’d have none of that mental singing and dancing business for a start, and we’d need good actors, obviously. To play us, I mean.’ He sucked his teeth while he thought for a few seconds. ‘Liam Neeson would be good as me. Yeah, I’d be happy with that… when he was a bit younger, like. Or that other bloke, whatever he’s called. Mind you, he’s a bit short.’

  Riaz reached to turn the music up a little.

  ‘Colin Farrell.’ Muldoon turned to study his partner. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You ever thought about who they’d get to play you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean there’s not so much choice, I wouldn’t have thought.’

  Riaz sniffed and turned to look out of his window. An emergency light came on in one of the driveways on the other side of the road and a few seconds later a small, thin fox sauntered out on to the pavement. It looked both ways and scratched itself, then trotted daintily away.

  ‘Oh, and I tell you what else,’ Muldoon said. ‘I was thinking about what you were saying the other day, about me enjoying the job. You know, enjoying it too much?’ He looked at Riaz. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t think you’re being very fair.’

  ‘So, we’ll have to disagree,’ Riaz said.

  ‘What’s wrong with enjoying your job? If you enjoy something, surely you’re going to better at it.’ Muldoon held his arms out. ‘Come on, you’ve got to give me that much, surely?’

  ‘I don’t mean you enjoy it the way someone would simply enjoy doing their job well. Painting a house nicely or scoring the winning goal in a football match. Not like that. Not like taking pride in it.’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Enjoying is not perhaps the right word.’

  ‘OK then.’

  ‘Luxuriating in it.’ Riaz nodded his head in time to the music and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. ‘No. Revelling. I dislike the fact that you revel in it quite so much.’

  Muldoon stared out of the window and thought about it.

  ‘Yeah, well —’

  Riaz held up a hand. He leaned forward again and a few seconds later Muldoon did the same. Riaz flicked the wiper stalk again and the picture became clearer.

  Muldoon turned off the radio.

  They watched Nicola Tanner’s car slow, stop, then reverse expertly into a parking space a few houses down from her own.

  PART TWO

  WORSE THAN WORDS

  NINETEEN

  Everyone stood up as the procession of teachers entered and climbed the short flight of stairs to the stage, followed a few seconds later by the headmaster. When the teachers sat down the children did the same and, once the coughing and sniffing and the scraping of chairs had stopped, the headmaster began to speak.

  ‘This is a very special assembly,’ he said. ‘Special, because this morning we are here to pay tribute to a friend and colleague.’ He turned to acknowledge the men and women in a line at the back of the stage then looked back out at the hundreds of pupils staring up at him. ‘To someone who taught many of you.’ He gave a sma
ll nod towards the wings and, a moment later, a face appeared on the screen behind him.

  A woman with dark curly hair and a crooked smile; a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, a gap between her teeth.

  There was more sniffing, a few sobs.

  The headmaster nodded, then said, ‘A special morning and a very sad one.’

  Thorne was struck by how young the man at the lectern was, how pleasant-looking. At least that’s how he seemed, relative to the memory Thorne had of the white-haired sadist who had taken such great pleasure in handing out detentions or canings and, on one memorable occasion, knocking Thorne and the boy sitting behind him to the floor with a window-pole. The fact that the teachers looked like sixth-formers was not the only thing that jarred with Thorne’s recollections of his own school. The hall they were sitting in seemed nowhere near as cavernous as the one in which he had sat fidgeting through tedious assemblies and terrible plays. In fact, the whole school felt far smaller than the concrete monstrosity he remembered.

  They always did.

  Thorne had been inside schools many times since his own education had ground unceremoniously to a halt almost forty years before. He’d been part of a team that had broken up a decent-sized MDMA operation run by fifth-formers in Tottenham. He had led the investigation into a fatal stabbing at a junior school, where both perpetrator and victim were barely out of short trousers. Only nine months earlier, he had earned the undying gratitude of a classroom full of eleven-year-olds, when he’d marched away a maths teacher whose internet history revealed an interest in his pupils that went far beyond long division.

  The schools might only have felt smaller, but they certainly seemed to have become a lot more dangerous.

  That smell was always the same, though, and Thorne had never been able to work out why, or exactly what the smell was. He couldn’t believe that, post Jamie Oliver, the kitchens were still turning out boiled cabbage and treacle sponge. Or that schools used exactly the same cleaning products in the corridors as they had back when he was being told off for running in them. He looked round at the rows of children – younger ones at the front, those with bras or bum-fluff gathered at the back – and wondered if it might not simply be them.