Girl On Fire

by Tony Parsons

‘Vann now says that he executed Adnan Khan,’ Hunt said. ‘Mr Khan was on his knees.’

  ‘Surrendering,’ Flynn said.

  We stared at each other, letting the weight of this revelation settle between us.

  But I was still not changing my story for these people. Even if Ray Vann had ratted himself out, I wasn’t going to join in.

  These bastards already had enough to put him away for life.

  ‘This of course explains the trajectory of the fatal gunshot wound that killed Mr Khan,’ Hunt said, almost smiling, clearly enjoying himself enormously. ‘Mr Khan was on his knees. Vann shot him. He is no longer offering any excuses. He does not claim that Mr Khan was reaching for a firearm. He does not even suggest that he was angry about the death of SFO DS Alice Stone.’

  ‘Raymond Vann now says that he killed that man in cold blood,’ Flynn said. ‘Everything about his version of events has changed.’

  ‘Apart from one thing,’ Hunt said. ‘He still puts you in that basement.’

  18

  I came out of the meeting with the IPCC and drove to the East End.

  There was a small shrine to Alice Stone under the blue lamp above the entrance to Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel. The great tide of flowers that had washed up on Borodino Street was a fading memory now but here, at her place of work, they would never forget.

  There were cards of condolences, addressed to her husband, on a neat pile of bouquets, some of them dying inside their cellophane, some fresh that morning, and cut from a newspaper there was one of the photographs that had been harvested from the happiest moments of her life.

  Alice was on a hotel tennis court somewhere sunny, a baby under one arm. The baby was clearly teething, pressing its pink gums into the tennis ball it was clutching as Alice laughed with joy in her life and delight at her luck.

  ‘People feel they know her,’ Jackson Rose said. ‘People who never met her. And I suppose they do.’ He must have come out of the station but I had not been aware of his presence until he spoke. There were three new sergeant stripes on the sleeve of his jacket.

  ‘Is Ray Vann inside?’ I said.

  Jackson nodded, his eyes still on the photograph of Alice Stone.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I said.

  Now he looked at me. ‘Ray came clean,’ he said.

  ‘And why the hell did he do that, Jackson?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You better ask him yourself.’

  We got the lift down to the shooting range in the basement. Jackson swiped us in with his card. The whiplash crack of live ammunition filled the air.

  There was an armoury desk to the right where weapons were checked in and out and, to the left, a line of firing booths, all of them occupied by officers wearing headphones and eyeglasses, squeezing off shots at paper targets that were as far away as twenty-five metres and as close as ten.

  Ray Vann was in the far booth, his firing arm steady as a pool cue as he blew out the bullseye of a paper target of an armed man, his shots placed so perfectly together that the hole in the target could have been put there by a shotgun. There was someone with him in the booth.

  Jesse Tibbs.

  ‘You got promoted,’ I said to Jackson as we watched Vann squeezing off his shots.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When we slot someone we always get a medal or a jail sentence. One or the other.’

  There was a TV on the wall behind the armoury desk. Sir Ludo Mount was giving a press conference.

  ‘In the light of fresh revelations, I can reveal that the IPCC will be recommending to the Crown Prosecuting Service that the death of Adnan Khan be prosecuted as murder,’ the lawyer said to a forest of microphones. ‘My client – Mrs Azza Khan, the mother of Adnan Khan – will also be filing a civil lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police and relevant individuals.’

  Jackson nodded at the TV and the uniformed sergeant on the armoury desk hit the mute button.

  Jesse Tibbs came out of the end booth, holding the tattered remains of the paper target. His face was covered in the sweat of the firing range, caused by the combination of claustrophobia and tension.

  Then Ray Vann emerged, looking calm and relaxed, still wearing eyeglasses but with his ear mufflers around his neck. He was still holding his handgun.

  ‘I dropped you in it,’ Vann said to me. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said.

  I had been in a thousand interview rooms and I knew the importance of sticking to your story. Whatever happened in that basement, I intended to keep on insisting that I didn’t see him do it.

  I was never going to rat him out.

  But now he had done it to himself.

  I watched Vann’s eyes lift to the silent TV screen and then drift away. He did not seem to register that it was his destiny that Sir Ludo was talking about.

  ‘What happened, Ray?’ I said.

  He stared at the floor, as if he was still trying to work it out himself.

  ‘The IPCC was like a dog with a bone,’ he said. ‘The old man and that blonde. Hunt and Flynn. They wouldn’t let it go. They kept hammering away about the post-mortem trajectory of the gunshot. They knew they had me from the start. They put those autopsy drawings on the table and just left them there. All through all of my interviews, the drawings were always there, as if I had never given a credible explanation for the angle of the shot. And the little man in the profile drawing always had a line entering his chest and leaving around the base of his spine. That’s how he died. A single shot entered Adnan Khan’s heart and exited from his lower back. The IPCC kept insisting that I must have killed him in cold blood. And in the end I agreed with them. In the end I didn’t know what else I could do.’

  ‘You could have backed him up from the start,’ Tibbs hissed at me.

  Vann looked at him gently. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, Jesse,’ he said. ‘My story never made sense.’

  I glanced up at the silent TV screen. Sir Ludo Mount was still talking.

  ‘Listen to me, Ray,’ I said. ‘That barrister up there will ruin you. He will see you jailed. He will destroy your family. You need to get your Federation rep to produce evidence that you are suffering from adjustment disorder caused by your service in Afghanistan. It is a legitimate defence.’

  I looked at Jackson for back-up and he nodded.

  ‘Shrinks talk about the stressors – the stresses, it means – that lead to mental illness,’ Jackson said. ‘It’s true, Ray. PTSD is not an excuse. It’s a reason.’

  Ray Vann’s back stiffened with pride.

  ‘Tell them I’m a nutjob?’ he said. ‘Because I served my country? You call that a defence? That I killed the bastard because I’m a raving loony?’ He shook his head. ‘Never, Max. I know you mean well, but that’s just not going to happen. You know why I killed him? Because he deserved to die. Because he had it coming. Because he deliberately brought that Air Ambulance down on all those innocent people in Lake Meadows. Because him and his brother – and his dad, for all I know, and his mother and the whole rotten lot of them – would dance on our children’s graves if we let them.’

  ‘It’s war,’ Jesse Tibbs said, his face in mine. ‘And they started it.’

  I put my hand on his chest and shoved him away.

  ‘Are you the one going down for murder, Tibbs?’ I said. ‘Then shut your cakehole.’

  He came at me and Jackson got between us and seized Tibbs by the scruff of the neck.

  Ray Vann smiled at us like an indulgent parent.

  His confession to the IPCC had left him curiously calm. And I had seen that in a thousand interview rooms too. The relief that comes with finally having the truth in the light, no matter how terrible it may be.

  ‘You OK, Raymond?’ Jackson said, and it was an echo of the day we went into Borodino Street, and I thought about my conversation with Vann in the locker room at Gravesend, and how the country he had served would never know of the things he had seen, and the terror he had
endured, and how it felt to see the body parts of your fallen friends strung from trees to mock you.

  ‘I might stay a little longer,’ Ray Vann said.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Jackson said.

  Vann looked longingly around the firing range. I wondered how long it would be before he was under arrest for murder. He would not be coming down here ever again and he seemed to know it.

  Jesse Tibbs put his arm around Ray Vann. Jackson and I watched the pair of them return to the booth.

  ‘He’s not going to hide behind a plea of adjustment disorder, Max,’ Jackson said. ‘Not a guy like that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be hiding behind it,’ I said. ‘It’s what’s happened to him. Vann’s a damaged man, Jackson. They sent him to their dirty war, all those politicians who never heard a shot fired that wasn’t on the grouse moor, and it broke something inside him.’

  Jackson shook his head. ‘Maybe. But he is just not going to claim to be some kind of victim, Max. He would rather go down.’

  ‘And what do you think they’re going to do to him when he tells them that Adnan Khan deserved to die?’ I said. ‘They’re going to put him away for life. Do you have any idea what it’s like for a former police officer doing hard time? And then there’s going to be a civil case that takes the Met – and his family – to the cleaners. They’re going to crucify him, Jackson.’

  And then it was all one unbroken moment.

  Tibbs shouted, ‘Raymond!’ and I saw Vann turn his back on his friend in the end booth, barging Tibbs away with his shoulder as Vann lifted the Glock to his open mouth and tilted his head back and pulled the trigger and the top of his head came off in an explosion of blood and bone.

  Ray Vann’s body fell as if the life had fled from him like a light going out as Tibbs froze, staring at the splatter on the walls of the booth and down the front of his uniform, the dead body of his friend at his feet.

  19

  As the sun went down at the end of the next day, Edie Wren and I sat outside the gates of Victoria Park in my old BMW X5 and we watched the lights come on in a march that was meant to be a call for an end to the killing.

  Peace in the Park, they were calling it.

  There were hundreds of lights, perhaps a thousand, the number growing all the time, and they made a universe of tiny stars piercing the soft summer darkness of Victoria Park. They were not the yellow and stuttering light of candles, they were not the kind of lights that looked like they could easily be extinguished. They were the bright and piercing white light of a thousand smartphones held aloft, a hard white light in the gathering twilight that made you think the stars were very close tonight. They looked like the kind of lights that would be burning long after we were all gone.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Edie said. She glanced at me. ‘Isn’t it beautiful, Max?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, although rallies for peace always made me slightly nervous. I had never seen a peace rally yet where someone didn’t get their head caved in. But Edie was right.

  All those lights shining in the darkness were beautiful.

  I looked at her sharp-faced profile, leaning forward in the passenger seat, a dreamy smile on her face, and for a long moment I just watched her watching the lights shine in the park.

  And I had to ask.

  ‘Is that it?’ I said.

  She looked at me and then back at the lights. She smiled, sighed, took a fistful of quad muscle in my left leg and gave it a squeeze.

  And I was amazed that I had waited so long to ask the question that had hung between us since the night – months ago now, just when the dark and cold was finally making way for the first rumour of spring – when I had gone to Edie’s home, rung the doorbell and stayed until morning.

  One night.

  Both of us had been in uncharted territory that night. We were at the end of a gruelling investigation into people trafficking that had begun with the discovery of thirteen passports and twelve young women dead in the back of a refrigerated truck in Chinatown, and ended with the thirteenth woman dying in our arms in a penthouse brothel. I was at a loss, owning up to some kind of loneliness, spending too long on the backstreets of Chinatown, feeling tempted by the invitations from doorways that greet a single man wandering those streets after dark. And Edie was in one of her periodic break-ups with her married Mr Big.

  So one Saturday night – the loneliest night of the week, someone once sang – I drove to Edie’s flat on the wrong side of Highbury Corner and I rang her bell, ready to take my chances. And she took me in.

  Sometimes you wait so long for something to happen that when it does – if it does – you are disappointed. But sometimes it is better. And when that happens, you suddenly know why you are alive. And you want that feeling again, of course you do, you want it more than anything, even if you suspect that it might never happen.

  ‘You were lovely,’ Edie said, her green eyes dancing between the lights and me. She tried to lighten the mood. ‘It wasn’t a one-night stand. It was an all-night stand.’

  ‘So you’ll be leaving a five-star review?’ I said. ‘That’s great. But that’s not what I’m asking.’

  ‘I know. But – and maybe you noticed – I am back with him, Max. He says he really means it this time – he’s going to leave his wife and move in with me and end all the sneaking around that makes me sick to my stomach.’ She shot me a desperate look. ‘And I have to try, don’t I?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, feeling foolish for being dumb enough to ask a question when I already knew the answer.

  Is that it? Yes, Max, that’s it. Of course that was it.

  ‘And you’ll be fine,’ Edie said. ‘You’ll be beating the girls off with a big stick. Women love a man who is bringing up a child alone. I’ve seen the way they look at you when you’re out with Scout.’

  For I moment I was tempted to tell Edie that Scout’s mother had decided that she should bring up our daughter but my heart was closing and I didn’t feel the urge to open it up.

  ‘It’s true,’ I agreed. ‘A cute little kid is even better for meeting girls than a dog. And I’ve got both. So watch out, world.’

  We laughed, but there was sadness in it because we wanted different things and nothing could be done to change that fact, not even a beautiful night in a park full of fairy lights.

  We had talked about it and now it was time to work.

  ‘What do they want, anyway?’ Edie said. ‘The Peace in the Park marchers?’

  ‘I guess they just want the deaths to stop,’ I said. ‘All this never-ending slaughter that we have started to think of as a part of normal life. Maybe they just want us to stop thinking of it as normal. It’s not a bad thing to want.’

  ‘What time does Victoria Park close?’

  ‘Dusk,’ I said. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. But not tonight.’

  More people were still arriving at the park, the only large green space in those crowded East End streets.

  We watched the crowds in silence, and I thought of all the other crowds that had been in this park before tonight to see the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Sylvia Pankhurst and The Clash, although not on the same bill, of course.

  The marchers were of every age and race and creed but some of the young men walking into Victoria Park had their hair brutally shaved at the sides and back and grown out on top, the Depression-era haircut that George Halfpenny had made popular on Borodino Street. But I saw no sign of George or his brother Richard. More people were arriving. More lights were coming on. A Milky Way of white lights in Victoria Park.

  And then finally we saw him. George Halfpenny.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Edie said. ‘Please give a big hand to your pound store prophet.’

  The crowd outside the entrance to Victoria Park was parting to allow a rickshaw to enter. George Halfpenny, his face drenched in sweat, acknowledged a burst of spontaneous applause with a curt nod as phones were pointed at his face. Young men with the same brutalist haircut touched
the side of his rickshaw, as if the converted tricycle had healing properties. As usual, his brother Richard sat in the back like some stocky, overfed little pharaoh.

  A Styrofoam cup of coffee hit the top of the rickshaw.

  Not everyone was a fan, it seemed.

  A small gang of the local youth were jeering and giving the finger to George Halfpenny.

  There were perhaps a dozen of them; the boys – and they were mostly boys – were all wispy beards and New York Yankees baseball caps, caught between the faith of their fathers and the sports franchises of the west.

  There were two girls with the little gang and one of them was Layla Khan.

  She already looked older, taller, her black hair longer and a hard mocking look on her face.

  ‘What’s Layla doing here?’ Edie said, like an irritated big sister. ‘If any of these marchers realise who she is …’

  The locals laughed as Halfpenny pedalled his rickshaw into the park. They followed in a jeering little gang, Layla in the middle of them, looking like she was having a fine old time. Edie watched them go, biting her lower lip.

  ‘You want to give George Halfpenny a tug?’ she asked. ‘We need to know where he was when Ahmed Khan was killed.’

  ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘We’ll do our TIE on George somewhere a bit less crowded.’

  We left the BMW X5 outside the gates and followed the crowds into Victoria Park. Full darkness had fallen now but the park was lit by the white lights of those countless phones and by the orange glow that hovers over the city at night. The press of the people increased the deeper we went into the park. Edie and I tried to stay together but she was slowly being carried away from me by the current of the crowd, as if caught in a riptide.

  And then, almost close enough to reach out and touch if I had the room to move my arms, I saw the priest.

  And I realised that I knew him.

  And I saw that it had always been the same priest on Borodino Street.

  The large black priest who had knelt to pray before a dwindling congregation the first time I had seen George Halfpenny. The priest who had prayed by the side of Joy Adams when she brought her flowers to the shrine for Alice Stone.