‘We haven’t actually laid hands on him yet, sir. But we do know where he is, and we’re getting ready to extract him. I sent you an audio file. It should be with you by now.’
There was indeed an email waiting for Joshua with a file attached. He clicked it open and turned up the volume on his laptop.
‘Thing is, Mum,’ he heard. ‘I know where Banji is.’
‘That’s Lyndall Mason’s voice,’ Chahda said. ‘Gaby Wright confirmed it.’
‘How could you know?’
‘And that’s Mrs Cathy Mason.’
‘He had to find a hiding place, so I showed him the warehouse by the canal. The last one they closed. Jayden and I used to play there. I knew about an attic room that’s hard to find.’
'We’ve identified the warehouse,’ Chahda said. ‘Gaby’s lot had already searched that building, but we’ve now got hold of the owner and the plans. There is indeed such a room, which the first search must have missed. And we have added confirmation: CI Ridgerton phoned the Rockham station this morning to report a sighting of the man near the canal.’
This morning, Joshua thought, and you didn’t tell me, as he heard Lyndall Mason saying, ‘I wanted to tell you, Mum. But he made me promise not to. Said you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Understand what?’ Lyndall’s mother’s voice was raised in anger.
‘Why he did what he did. That’s all he’d say.’
Joshua pressed pause. ‘How did you get hold of this?’
‘We installed a listening device.’ Another grin, this one triumphant. ‘It was the only way.’
A gamble by Chahda that had paid off but which his boss had expressly forbidden. Chahda must be the rotten apple the PM had been warning of. When this is over, Joshua thought, I’ll pack him off in a tumbrel. He pressed play.
‘I took him food. But today the trapdoor was shut and he wouldn’t answer. I’m worried, Mum. He kept saying how there’s people after him.’
He stopped the recording. ‘Are there officers already on their way to extract him?’
‘Not yet, sir. We’ve alerted SC&O19, but, given the disturbances, there’s a shortage of trained officers. And of ballistic vests.’
‘You’re planning to go in armed?’
‘A precaution, sir, after what we’ve seen of Jibola’s behaviour. And, reading into what Lyndall Mason said, he’s also paranoid.’
It’s not paranoia, Joshua thought, if people really are after you. ‘Let me know when you’re ready to roll.’
8.30 p.m.
The cafe was crowded, the air thick with the aroma of home cooking, and the windows misted by the moisture and from the bubbling pots of food. Not that Lyndall and Jayden seemed to notice. They polished off every morsel of jerk chicken and rice and peas that had been piled on their plates and then shared a third portion, seeming almost to inhale the food like only the truly starving or the adolescent ever did. And then at last Lyndall’s ‘Thanks, Mum’ was delivered on an open smile. ‘Sorry I’ve been such a pig,’ followed by a more tentative, ‘Can we go see him now?’
Cathy nodded. She didn’t want to, but seeing him, and warning him off Lyndall, was the only way she could think of breaking them both free. She glanced out to where the sky had blackened with the threat of the incoming storm. ‘Let’s have some tea,’ she said. ‘And wait to see if the rain will pass.’
8.40 p.m.
A rumbling – the heavens growling – and then the clouds that had turned an evening sky into night were cracked open by a blaze of light.
‘Jesus, did you see that?’
That same sound and almost immediately afterwards (the storm must be right above them) a sheet of yellow light seemed to set the sky afire.
‘It’s like the Northern Lights.’
Rain had begun to drum down on the roof of their van so that when the sergeant said, ‘Except the Northern Lights won’t electrocute you,’ he had to shout to be heard. ‘This lot could. When the signal comes, run at a crouch. Heads low and keep a good grip on your weapons.’
More thunder followed by a jagged lightning that seemed to sizzle through the air.
‘That was close.’ Joshua was sitting with Anil Chahda in the back of his car as the rain thundered down.
‘It’ll work in our favour,’ Chahda said. ‘No way Jibola will hear us coming.’
Joshua peered out into the thick darkness. ‘Do the men know that Jibola is one of us?’
‘No, sir.’ As thunder rolled again, Chahda, smelling of the musk aftershave he used, leant over to shout, ‘We’ve kept that information on a strict need-to-know basis.’
‘That’ll make them more trigger happy.’
‘They’re well trained, sir.’
‘Even so, I don’t want Jibola hurt.’
‘Course not, sir. If it can be avoided.’ Chahda pressed his watch to light up the dial. ‘Thirty seconds.’ He looked across to Joshua. ‘No point in all of us getting soaked. Why not stay here until it’s over?’
‘Oh, I reckon I can withstand a bit of rain.’
‘As you wish, sir.’ Chahda opened the door and the rain came blasting in. ‘They’re off.’
Ahead, the van doors had been rolled open to let out a line of men who, crouching low, ran towards the warehouse door. The rain was so thick that the darkness had soon sucked them in.
‘Come on.’ Joshua was also out and also running. Within seconds he was soaked through.
Another crack of thunder and the sky split, the lightning sending a jagged streak over the running line of men, who, having reached the door, formed themselves into two lines on either side of it. A thud, this time an earthly one, as a battering ram was slammed against the door, which splintered and gave way, so that soon Joshua could see the wraiths of sodden men disappearing into the dark interior.
He followed, registering the hard puffing of Chahda’s breath beside him, watching the flash trace of torchlight flitting up the stairs.
‘Watch your step, sir.’ This from the officer who’d been posted at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Some of them are really rotten.’
Above them soft voices could be heard calling out, ‘Clear.’
By the time they reached the first floor, the flicker of torches was already on the way up again.
A flash of sheet lightning lit up the cavernous space, illuminating broken windows and a floor littered with crates and bits of furniture, all of them covered with what looked like oil. Joshua wiped a finger over the balustrade, feeling how sticky it was and then, holding the finger up to his nose, smelt not oil but something stickier and more viscous that stank of something rotten. An awful place to hole up in. If Jibola had been in a bad way when he’d got here, he would be much worse now.
Darkness as the lightning faded and those soft calls: ‘Clear.’
‘We think he’s up a trapdoor on the floor above,’ Chahda said in his ear.
They climbed the last flight of stairs up to the top floor, where they found the men grouped along one wall. One of their number was standing away from them and using his torch to illuminate what was clearly a trapdoor in the wooden ceiling. At a nod from his sergeant, another pulled at the latch of the door, which opened, letting down a ladder which the officer caught and gently lowered so that it didn’t bang, the torch illuminating what should have been a space but wasn’t.
‘He’s dragged something over the area,’ Chahda whispered. ‘That must be what Lyndall Mason meant.’
A moment’s confab – how were they going to get up there without alerting Jibola?
‘We’ll go in fast,’ the sergeant kept his voice so low they had to crowd round him to hear what he was saying, ‘in the hope that the element of surprise will prevent any counterstrike. We need something solid to stand on – the battering ram – and the carbon arc searchlight should blind him for a moment. I will go in first with that; Wilson, you’ll be following with your weapon cocked. You others after. Careful if you have to fire: we don’t want to lose any of our own.’
r /> No sooner said than prepared. One of the officers got onto the platform they’d built out of crates and stood, waiting. When the next blast of thunder began to roll, he lifted the battering ram, banging at whatever was blocking the opening and shifting it out of the way. As soon as that was done he jumped to one side while his sergeant, light upheld, climbed up the ladder, followed by his second. There was a queue behind, the men waiting to go up, with the first one already halfway when the sergeant’s face appeared in space of the open trapdoor. ‘You better come and see this, sir,’ he said to Joshua, and then, to his men, ‘Stand down, lads. Stand down.’
8.50 p.m.
With the storm showing no signs of letting up, they decided to brave it. The rain was sheeting down so hard that within minutes of coming out of the cafe all three were soaked. Since no coat any of them possessed would have withstood such a deluge, there wasn’t any point in going home and drying off before venturing out again and, besides, since the rain was warm, the wet felt almost welcome.
‘Although if it goes on much longer,’ Cathy said, ‘it’s going to be as black as pitch.’
Such a quantity of rain had already fallen that the gutters were bubbling with it, and the roads awash. At first they hugged the far sides of the pavements to avoid being splashed, but soon they were so wet it didn’t matter. Walking turned into a game of hopscotch as they dodged the vegetables and plastic bags and other detritus that bobbed along with the rivulets of rain that were soon so deep that they took off their shoes and walked on carrying them. Past the High Street, which was empty – no pedestrian in their right mind or, for that matter, rioter would venture out in this unless driven to.
Which Cathy was. ‘No,’ Lyndall kept saying and shaking her head when Cathy suggested aborting the expedition. ‘No’ and ‘No’ again. ‘He needs us.’ And so on they went, soaked to the skin and making their way towards the canal. Which, when they got to it, was inky black and heaving with rain.
They crossed the bridge, normally a resting place for drunks who wanted to be left alone to drink, and on to the opposite bank.
‘It’s there.’ Lyndall’s pointing arm was washed in rain. ‘The third in that row.’
Cathy thought she saw something – a dark shadow, moving. ‘Is that . . .?’ But no, nobody there: probably just an illusion of the rain. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get him.’
There being so much mud churned up on either side of the gravel path, they walked in single file with Cathy in front. Water dropped off her chin and splashed down the ends of her bedraggled hair, and it got into her eyes, so she kept on having to shake her head to clear her vision. She was grateful for the distraction. When she finally did come face to face with Banji, what was she going to say?
The brooding outline of the building Lyndall had pointed to was coming closer.
‘It’s the one after this,’ she heard Lyndall saying.
Somebody there. She saw them now as a dark outline. ‘Who’s there?’ she called.
The faint beam of their torch lit up the shafting rain. ‘What are you up to?’ The man – a policeman, she saw – was peering anxiously at them. ‘Identify yourselves.’ He raised something – a whistle – to his lips.
'I’m Cathy Mason.’ She stepped up to make sure he saw her empty hands. ‘And this is my daughter Lyndall and Jayden, a friend.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘We’re . . .’
‘Taking a walk,’ Lyndall piped up.
‘Funny time for a walk.’ The policeman let his whistle drop and swiped his face, wiping away the rain. ‘But you can’t keep on this path. It’s blocked. You need to go back the way you came and cross the bridge, and then you can walk along the opposite bank. Although if I were you on such a filthy night, I’d just go home.’
Over his head Cathy thought she saw lights flickering high up in the warehouse. ‘What’s going on, officer?’ She was right: there were lights there.
‘Police operation,’ he said. ‘Nothing that . . .’
Lyndall’s loud ‘You told them’ stopped him from finishing his sentence.
‘No, I did not.’
Lyndall’s voice even louder: ‘You did. You fucking well told them.’
‘Now, now.’ The policeman shone his torch in Lyndall’s face.
Her eyes were ablaze and focused on her mother: ‘That’s why you were acting so nice, buying us supper and all. Waiting for the rain to end. You told them and then you slowed us down so we couldn’t go and warn him.’
‘Him?’ The policeman took a step closer. ‘Who’s him?’
‘Oh, go fuck yourself.’ Lyndall turned on her heel and marched off.
8.55 p.m.
It had been a filthy day and the beginnings of a night that wasn’t turning out to be much better. Peter rolled off Patricia to lie beside her on his back: ‘I’m such a cliche.’
‘It’s okay.’ Patricia stretched out a consoling hand. ‘It’s only because you had such a hard day.’
Which – given that he’d lost his wife, his home, the possibility of ever becoming Leader – was an understatement that nearly made him laugh out loud. He breathed in, registering that same slightly musty odour he had smelt on her earlier. ‘Have you changed your perfume?’
'No.’ She frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Just something I keep smelling.’
‘Really?’ She lifted up an arm and (something Frances would never in a million years have done) sniffed under an armpit. ‘Seems okay to me.’
Leave it, he told himself. And said, ‘Perhaps a shower?’
He saw the hurt in her expression, but all she said was, ‘Okay, then’ before getting out of bed and closing the door of the en-suite behind her.
As soon as she had gone, he felt the relief of being on his own.
Despite the air conditioning, the room felt stuffy. Enclosed. Claustrophobic. It was the change, he supposed. Because although he’d been with her in many a hotel room, these had always been fleeting visits, a step out of their separate lives. But now he had no home to go to and, with the press camped on her doorstep, they couldn’t go to hers.
So here they must stay.
For better or for worse.
He sighed, got up and went over to the windows that ran the length of one wall. Not their usual choice of hotel: this one was corporate with many rooms stacked, each one of the same size and same inoffensive decor as its neighbour.
He pulled the cord and the curtains swished open to expose a dark night. He thought that the storm, whose thunder could be heard even through the double glazing, and whose lightning had flashed in like a warning, must have moved on, but as soon as he pulled open the slotted casement at the top of the window, rain came sheeting in. He pushed it closed, thinking, drought over, flood on the way.
‘Shall we go out to eat?’ Patricia called.
Eat at a restaurant with his face and hers on every media outlet: what was she thinking of? ‘We’d better use room service.’
‘Okay.’ Her faint reply was followed by the sound of singing.
She was happy.
Of course she was. She’d got what she’d always wanted: him.
He’d order a nice bottle of red with supper, he thought, and if there wasn’t one that suited his fancy, he would send the concierge out with full instructions. In the meantime, what he needed most was a stiff drink.
He went over to the minibar and broke the seal. Didn’t like the look of the whisky so got out a mini bottle of gin to which he added tonic. Took a sip. Grimaced. Why anybody ever used slimline tonic was beyond him. Thought, maybe more gin would drive that plastic taste away, and poured another in.
9.04 p.m.
As soon as Joshua surmounted the final rung and hauled himself up into the room, he saw the body.
It was hanging off a beam in the ceiling. A male, IC3, dangling with his back to the trapdoor as if he were looking through a window in the eaves.
‘He’s dead?’
The
sergeant nodded. ‘Sure is. And by the ligature mark on his neck looks like he’s been dead for a while.’
The low-roofed space was messy with empty cartons of food littered about and dust so thick that Joshua could see where rain had dripped off the sergeant and also the marks left by his feet when he had approached the body.
‘Do we have any paper shoes?’ Joshua was shouting at the people below so as to be heard above the drumming rain, and on receiving a reply in the negative he said to the sergeant, ‘Go and find me two plastic bags. Clean as you can get them. Get the Deputy Commissioner to bring them up – but not to step past the door. And ask an FME to attend urgently. Tell them I’m here: that should hurry them up. The rest of your men are to wait in the van until such time as we have secured the scene.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant made his way down the ladder.
Not wanting to cause any further disruption to the room, Joshua just stood and looked at the dangling body.
He had watched the footage of Jibola throwing the Molotov over and over again. He had also read his record, interviewed his wife and begun to understand how beleaguered Jibola must have been feeling in order to do what he had done. Now, taking in that awful, lonely sight, he thought again about how very desperate Jibola must have been. Unless of course he hadn’t hanged himself.
He looked through the dust, trying to see if he could make out any tracks that might indicate the dragging of a body.
‘Sir.’ Anil Chahda’s head had appeared in the trapdoor ‘Is it Jibola?’
‘Seems like it, but I’m going to go over just to be sure.’ He took the bags from Chahda, wrapped them round his shoes and used the handles to tie them on. Then, taking care to trace the sergeant’s footprints in the dust, he made his way over to the body. The head was hanging, swollen, at an angle, the eyes bulging, the skin paler than he expected but even so: ‘Yes,’ he called to the waiting Chahda. ‘It is Julius Jibola.’
11.55 p.m.
The rain was pelting down, soaking her. She was cold. She needed more clothes. She looked down.
Blood – that was the colour of the rain: blood that was now dripping off her summer frock. She cried out.
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