Girl On Fire

by Tony Parsons

  You know handwriting. Even when years have gone by.

  Even in this age when nobody writes letters or postcards any more. You still know someone’s handwriting, if they have been close enough. You never forget it.

  Anne’s handwriting was neat, small but thick somehow, as if she pressed too hard, as if she was trying to make her point on a world that was not paying her enough attention.

  But the card was not addressed to me.

  It was for Scout. I didn’t open it. I didn’t tell her about it. I left it between Your Dog and Boxing Monthly and sat down to eat the toast Scout had made for me. It was a bit burned but slathered in lots of glorious New Zealand butter, just the way I liked it.

  ‘It’s good toast, Scout.’

  She was staring down sternly at the dog.

  Stan was bug-eyed with longing.

  ‘Carbs are bad for you, Stan,’ she said. ‘We have to watch your weight or you’ll get sick and die.’

  He licked his lips, ready to take his chances.

  A light summer rain pattered against the giant windows of the loft.

  ‘We’re going to have to walk between the raindrops,’ Scout said, and I laughed out loud.

  Nobody could make me laugh like my daughter.

  ‘Scout,’ I said, as casually as I could manage. ‘Your mum has written to you.’

  I picked up the card and handed it to her, making her transfer her jam-smeared toast from right hand to left. I didn’t know what else to say. There was nothing else to say.

  Scout’s mother had left us before Scout started school, walking out because she was in love with someone else and expecting his child and planning to build a new life. It was as simple and brutal as that. So that was all pretty final. There had been some patchy contact between Anne and Scout at first but it had spluttered out as the new life crowded in.

  It might have been a bit different if Anne had not been pregnant when she left – and then quickly got pregnant again – but Scout did not fit easily into this new life. My ex-wife tried to fit her in, but she did not try hard enough. And so she drifted away and Scout and I were left to get on with it. Which we did.

  It happens all the time. And when people talk to me as if they have never heard anything like it happening before – a father being left to bring up his kid alone, a mother too wrapped up in her new life to think much about the beautiful child from the old life – I always truly envy them their sheltered, civilised, cosy, middle-class lives.

  Adults carry on, I thought, watching Scout hold the card, and children pay the price. And for a mad moment I thought that the card contained an apology to Scout and all the sons and daughters of all the divorced mothers and fathers. Only divorced adults get new lives, I thought. Divorced children are stuck with their old lives – and with their dumb-ass divorced parents – for ever.

  Her fingers sticky with butter and strawberry jam and toast crumbs, Scout tore open the envelope.

  ‘It’s a party invitation,’ she said.

  She showed me the card. There were laughing cartoon animals juggling balloons and cake while driving toy cars. Inside was an invitation to a fourth birthday party.

  I couldn’t bring myself to think of the birthday boy as Scout’s brother. Even half-brother was beyond me.

  ‘Mummy’s little boy,’ Scout said. ‘It’s his birthday.’

  ‘That’s very nice,’ I said.

  ‘Is he four already?’

  ‘I guess he must be.’

  Scout frowned.

  ‘But he’s young.’

  I had to smile at that. ‘And what are you? An old lady? You’re only seven, Scout. You’re not getting your free bus pass just yet.’

  I took the card from her.

  And I saw that she was angry.

  If this contact after so many years of silence was strange for me, then how must it be for Scout?

  ‘You know your mother never stopped loving you,’ I said, and I believed it, despite all the evidence. Or maybe I just could not bear the thought of my daughter not being loved exactly as she deserved to be loved.

  ‘She’s very busy,’ Scout said.

  It was always the default excuse for my ex-wife’s disappearing act. Now, at seven, Scout spat it out with a bit of an edge.

  Some absent parents think they can pick it up again when the time is right, when it suits them, and I have no doubt this is true. But abandoned children will not wait for ever for the absent parent to make things right. The clock is ticking.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘You can go to this party if you want or you can skip it if you want. It’s true the other kids will be smaller than you, but I’m sure you will have a good time. But it’s up to you, Scout.’

  ‘I don’t have to go?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Then I’m not going,’ she said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, wanting our Saturday to begin again. ‘Where we taking Stan today?’

  ‘The big walk on Hampstead Heath. The two-hour walk. Down The Avenue, cut across Parliament Hill, then down to the bathing ponds.’

  ‘Lunch in the Coffee Cup on Hampstead High Street?’

  She gave me the double thumbs-up. We smiled at each other then both stole a quick glance at the party invitation, as if it had strange powers that we could not imagine.

  By the time we came back from our two-hour walk on Hampstead Heath and Saturday lunch at the Coffee Cup on Hampstead High Street, I had forgotten about it. I was surprised to see it still lying on the breakfast table. But it had lost its power to hurt us.

  We were left to get on with it, I thought.

  And we did.

  So please excuse us if we don’t give a damn any more.

  But on Sunday night I was in Scout’s room laying out her school clothes for Monday morning when, half-poking out of a paint-smeared cardboard folder, I saw a painting that she had done in her first year at school.

  MY FAMILY was the title.

  At five, they were just starting to make sense of the world and their place in it. All the other children had drawings that seemed to be teeming with life. Stick-figure daddies with their important briefcases, and stick-figure mummies who either had a briefcase or a baby, and lots of stick-figure siblings, larger and smaller. But Scout had only her stick-figure daddy with no briefcase and a four-legged red daub with bulging black eyes.

  That was the extent of Scout’s family.

  Me and Stan.

  The first time I had seen the painting it had torn at my heart. There was too much white space, there was too little life, and there were not enough people in Scout’s world.

  And now that old painting tore at my heart again.

  Because on one side of the painting Scout had added an extra figure.

  A pretty lady with dark hair, hovering on the edge of the little family, the drawing rendered far more expertly two years on. As if drawing something could make it so, as if just wishing something could turn back time to when things were simple and our family was unbroken.

  I tucked the drawing neatly into her file, so that she would never know I had seen it.

  I had moved on. But it was too much to expect my daughter to do the same.

  Scout was lounging on the sofa with Stan, playing a game on her phone.

  ‘Maybe you should go to that birthday party after all,’ I said, as lightly as I could.

  ‘OK,’ she said, very quickly, not looking up from the exploding fruit.

  So when Scout was tucked up in bed and I was certain she was sleeping, I wrote the RSVP, sickened to my soul at the way the world turns the children of divorced parents into pocket diplomats, negotiating their way between a man and a woman whose love brought them into the world and who later decide to hate each other’s guts.

  Then without even thinking about it I turned on the TV and watched the latest news from Borodino Street. As far as I could tell, the young man in the suit and bow tie who was addressing the crowd on Saturday morning had gone. But the flowers were stil
l there, and Alice Stone was still smiling in all her photographs and the sombre crowds were still there, waiting for something to happen.

  Moonlight streamed in through the big windows of our loft, thrown open to let in fresh air on a muggy summer night.

  The great bell chimed midnight at St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Sunday night slipped into Monday morning.

  And I breathed in.

  8

  ‘Who is that guy?’ Edie said.

  When I walked into MIR-1 first thing Monday morning, she was watching the latest images from Borodino Street.

  As they cut to the view from the helicopter, you could clearly see the same young man addressing the crowd at the end of the street. His audience was bigger today. Their faces were turned away from the house, the flowers, the mourners and the epic makeshift shrine to Alice Stone.

  ‘He has to be harmless,’ Edie said. ‘Doesn’t he?’

  ‘There are enough cops on that street to pick him up if he’s a crank,’ I said.

  We watched the scene in silence. The tiny back garden was stacked high with torn-out floorboards. A skip was piled with plaster and bricks from the walls and ceilings.

  ‘The search teams have hollowed it out,’ I said.

  ‘And still no grenades,’ Edie said. ‘What happened to them, Max?’

  TDC Adams answered the phone.

  ‘IPCC waiting for you,’ she told me.

  I had clocked the IPCC investigators as soon as I had walked into West End Central and I know that they had clocked me. They were an odd couple – an overweight man in his fifties, looking crumpled in a stained cheap suit and worn out before the day had got started, and a well-groomed, gym-fit young woman with long blond hair, her eyes sharp behind large black glasses. I had made no attempt to introduce myself.

  The Independent Police Complaints Commission is the police watchdog with the power to decide if a serving cop who makes a split-second decision is a hero or a criminal.

  They were only doing their job. But they were not my friends.

  My Police Federation rep was waiting for me outside the interview room. He was one of those teak-hard old Londoners they don’t seem to make any more, a tough, scrupulously neat little man who had been some kind of Mod in his youth – there was a care taken in his clothes, his hair, the way he carried himself.

  ‘DC Wolfe? Andy Vine from the PFEW.’

  The Police Federation of England and Wales.

  We shook hands.

  ‘Don’t lose your rag in there,’ Vine advised me.

  The two IPCC investigators were already inside. The rumpled old boy looked as though he was ready for a nap. The young blonde took brisk charge.

  ‘For the tape, can you identify yourself?’ she said.

  ‘DC Max Wolfe of Homicide and Serious Crime Command, West End Central.’

  ‘I’m Marilyn Flynn of the Independent Police Complaints Commission,’ she said. ‘Also present is Gordon Hunt of the IPCC.’ The old boy stirred at the mention of his name. ‘DC Wolfe has the appropriate Police Federation representation,’ Flynn noted.

  Then she opened her file.

  ‘This is an investigation into the two firing officers on Operation Tolstoy,’ she said. ‘What was your role in the raid on Borodino Street, DC Wolfe?’

  ‘I was there for background briefing and to ID the targets. My department had interviewed a CI who had sold two grenades to the Khan brothers.’

  ‘Allegedly,’ said Flynn.

  I looked at her.

  I may have raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Allegedly sold two Cetinka hand grenades,’ she said, nodding her head for emphasis. ‘But they didn’t exist, did they? These grenades. They turned out to be a figment of your CI’s imagination.’

  ‘A cache of Cetinka hand grenades certainly existed because after the initial conversation with our CI we recovered two of them buried in a flower bed in a park in South London. Those were the two grenades that we photographed in West End Central. We had been informed that there were more grenades out there and that two of them had found their way to Asad and Adnan Khan. But it’s true that the Search Team have so far been unable to find them at the address in Borodino Street.’ I gave her a smile. ‘That hardly means that they do not exist.’

  ‘You don’t think your CI may have lied to increase his value to you?’

  ‘That is always a possibility with a Criminal Informant,’ I said. ‘But the Khan brothers were known returnees. These men were battle-hardened jihadists.’ I took a deep breath. And then another. My rep was right – losing my rag would be bad news for everyone. ‘We now believe that it was Asad and Adnan Khan who brought down that Air Ambulance helicopter on Lake Meadows shopping centre. They wanted to take as many innocent lives as possible. So it wasn’t any kind of stretch to believe they were in the market for a couple of Croatian hand grenades.’

  ‘But that has never been proved in a court of law, has it, DC Wolfe?’ Flynn said. ‘Their involvement in the Lake Meadows attack?’

  ‘The house on Borodino Street was packed with drones. It was a drone that brought down that helicopter.’ I felt my blood rising. ‘The Khan brothers boasted on social media about their exploits in Syria. Torturing non-believers, burning prisoners to death, beheading aid workers – the usual heroics.’

  I felt my Federation rep stir nervously by my side.

  I smiled again at Marilyn Flynn, letting some of the anger seep out of me.

  ‘But you’re right,’ I agreed. ‘They died before they could be brought to any kind of justice. So – never proven in a court of law. That’s correct.’

  She nodded, opened her laptop and hit a key.

  Photographs of Jackson Rose and Raymond Vann appeared on the flat TV screen beside her. They were standard Met ID photos. But today they looked like police mugshots of guilty men. Even their call signs – Jackson was C7 and Vann was C3 – looked like jail numbers.

  ‘For the tape, can you identify the two firing officers, DC Wolfe?’

  ‘C7 is DC Jackson Rose and C3 is DC Raymond Vann.’

  ‘Had you met either of the two firing officers before Operation Tolstoy?’

  ‘I had never seen DC Vann before. But I grew up with Jackson – DC Rose. He’s my oldest friend.’

  She stared at me, letting it sink in, exchanging a look with the old boy, Gordon Hunt, before proceeding.

  ‘You were on board the jump-off van with the entry team, correct?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened when you arrived in Borodino Street?’

  ‘DS Alice Stone was murdered.’

  A flicker of irritation on Flynn’s face.

  ‘Before the death of DS Stone.’

  ‘The entry team were about to leave the van when the front door opened and someone wearing a niqab came out. One of those long black robes with a face veil.’

  ‘We know what a niqab is, DC Wolfe.’

  ‘I identified the figure as Asad Khan.’

  ‘How long did the ID take you?’ Flynn said.

  ‘I don’t know. A second? Five seconds? I really don’t know.’

  Time moves differently when you are in the presence of violent death, I think. It stretches. A moment can feel like a thousand years.

  But sharing this thought seems pointless.

  ‘Carry on,’ Flynn said briskly.

  ‘I made a positive identification of the target. DS Stone left the jump-off van and attempted to detain Adnan Khan. He was in possession of an assault rifle. He fired multiple shots at DS Stone. They proved fatal.’

  ‘Is this the weapon?’

  A profile of a fifty-year-old Heckler & Koch G3 appeared on the screen with the strapline EVIDENCE and a serial number.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then C7 – DC Rose – shot Mr Khan,’ Flynn said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The SFOs left the jump-off van. C7 – DC Rose – issued the appropriate verbal warning to Mr Khan. “Armed police! Drop the weapon and show me your hands!” DC
Rose – C7 – followed procedure to the letter. And then I saw C7 fire two shots at Mr Khan. They both struck the target.’

  A small smile on Flynn’s glossy lips. ‘You can remember his exact words? In all that confusion and gunfire? You have a remarkable memory.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  I felt my rep moving in his seat.

  ‘Why did you enter the house?’ Flynn said.

  ‘I was there to ID the two targets. That was my role. We had only identified one target. I believed that the other brother, Adnan Khan, was in the house. And there was the possibility of other armed KAs being on the premises. We had no idea how big the cell was.’

  ‘KAs?’

  ‘Known associates. As you are aware, there is an ongoing investigation by CTU to see if the Khan brothers were part of a wider network of murdering nutjobs.’

  ‘What happened inside the house?’

  ‘I saw drones. Boxes of drones everywhere. That’s when I knew these gentlemen had been responsible for bringing down that Air Ambulance helicopter.’

  Flynn shook her elegant head.

  ‘Let’s forgo the speculation and stick to the facts, shall we, DC Wolfe?’

  ‘Then these are the facts. I entered the house on Borodino Street and in the kitchen I discovered Ahmed Khan, the father of the Khan brothers, Azza Khan, their mother, and their teenage granddaughter Layla, whose father died fighting for Islamic State in Syria. They were all clearly terrified. I instructed them to leave the house as quickly as possible with their hands in the air.’

  I raised my hands to demonstrate. Palms facing outwards, showing they held nothing.

  Gordon Hunt stirred.

  ‘Was that because you were afraid that some trigger-happy SFO might take a potshot at them when they came out,’ he said, smiling.

  It was not a question.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was afraid they could die in crossfire. My colleagues from SC&O19 conducted themselves with total professionalism throughout Operation Tolstoy.’ I paused at a memory. ‘Seconds after Asad Khan had shot and killed DS Stone, SFOs who loved her were giving Asad Khan first aid in an attempt to save his life.’ I shook my head with genuine wonder. ‘I never questioned their professionalism. I was simply trying to ensure there was no unnecessary loss of life.’