Girl On Fire

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Is that going to be his alibi?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a pretty good one?’ I said.

  ‘They’ve always got an alibi,’ Whitestone said. ‘Every villain I ever met. Nobody was guilty. Not one of the dealers, the muggers, the wife-beaters, the pimps – and the murderers, Max. They were all somewhere else.’ She nodded briefly at the phone. ‘It’s good you bagged and tagged it, but let’s see if it stands up for more than five minutes before we make him a free man, shall we?’

  I put the phone back in the evidence bag and sealed it.

  ‘So you think the film is fake?’ I said.

  Whitestone shrugged. ‘The film is real. I’ll give him that much. But I think the time and date stamp are likely to be fabricated.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s a perfect alibi and you know it,’ I said.

  The anger flared.

  ‘And has he got an alibi for assaulting a police officer, Max? PC Sykes is in an ICU in an induced coma with a cracked skull and a blood clot on the brain. Does he have an alibi for that, Max?’

  Edie and Joy Adams were standing in the doorway.

  Both of them had their breakfast with them.

  ‘Sorted?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Edie nodded, coming into the room. She watched Whitestone warily for a moment and then gave Joy the nod. The pair of them settled down to some breakfast from Bar Italia.

  Nothing much would happen in West End Central for a while.

  George Halfpenny was being processed in the custody suite. He would be cautioned, searched, relieved of his possessions, read his rights by the custody officer, fingerprinted, photographed, mouth swabbed and hair root plucked for DNA, visited by the station’s duty solicitor and then, after this initial flurry of activity, all the meticulous, well-oiled bureaucracy of arrest, he would be left to stew in his cell before we got around to questioning him.

  ‘Is that team of shots still here?’ I said.

  ‘In the car park,’ Edie said.

  So that’s where I went.

  Down in the underground car park below West End Central, Jackson’s team of Special Firearms Officers were hanging out behind the back of their jump-off van, all feeling pretty good. Drinking coffee, yakking it up, eating bacon sandwiches, grinning with relief that it had gone down the way it did.

  There was a murder suspect in custody, no weapons had been discharged and the only casualty was the uniformed police officer who had got a nasty bang on the head when George Halfpenny decked him. But the job was done and the bacon sandwiches were hot and the sun was shining and nobody was dead.

  Jesse Tibbs had a big dopey grin on his bearded face that disappeared when I threw my PASGT helmet at him and knocked his carton of tea all over him. He turned away, cursing, PG Tips dripping down his body armour.

  ‘Hey, top gun?’ I said. ‘Look at me, top gun, will you? You going to make me crawl, are you? Come on, top gun – let’s see you make me crawl.’

  I had my hands around his throat before I was gripped from behind, and my arms locked by my side. What you should always do when someone does that to you is lift your feet off the ground and drop your centre of gravity before throwing your head back in a kind of reverse headbutt that – with a bit of luck – scatters a few of their front teeth to the wind. That always makes them let you go.

  But I knew who was pulling me off. And so I resisted the urge.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ Jackson snarled in my ear, and I heard years of resentment in his voice, years of it, decades of it, the seasoned bile of brothers.

  He dragged me away from Tibbs, still gripping me from behind, my arms still pinned to my side.

  ‘Ask him,’ I said. ‘Ask your man Tibbs. He reckons he’s going to make me crawl because he blames me for Ray Vann topping himself – don’t you, top gun?’

  Tibbs delicately shook his arm, sending off a spray of English Breakfast tea.

  ‘You know what you did,’ he said darkly.

  ‘He reckons he’s going to make me crawl, Jackson,’ I said, and I was suddenly sick of being held.

  I lifted my feet from the ground, dropped my body weight, and thrashed like a dying rat in a dog’s mouth until Jackson let me go.

  He put his hand on my chest and looked at Tibbs.

  ‘Are you making threats to this man, Jesse?’ Jackson asked him.

  Tibbs snorted. ‘Anything I want to say to him, he’ll know because I’ll be standing on his doorstep.’

  Which was the wrong thing to say to me.

  I am very fussy about who I have standing on the doorstep of my home where I live with my daughter and my dog.

  It was another threat, and the worst kind of all.

  ‘Let’s have it then,’ I said. ‘I’ll shove that shotgun right up—’

  Jackson pushed my chest, shoving me backwards. And he did it again, knocking me back another step. And then I stood there and I shook my head and it was just my oldest friend and me and I was not going to let him push me back any further.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  And he didn’t.

  We stared at each other, our fists clenched by our sides.

  I turned away, heading up the ramp for the exit, fresh air and daylight blazing ahead of me. It was going to be another beautiful day. I turned at the top of the ramp.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ I told them. ‘George Halfpenny. They’re going to have to let him go. He was nowhere near Ahmed Khan when he was killed.’

  ‘So what?’ Tibbs shouted. ‘Nobody cares about that old Paki. Only you.’

  But there was someone else who cared about Ahmed Khan.

  I walked round to the front of the building and found Layla sitting outside under the big blue lamp that marks the main entrance to West End Central.

  It was still ridiculously early. Uniformed coppers were still coming off the night shift. The bespoke tailors on Savile Row were all still closed. A few dead-keen office workers were carrying coffee to their offices in Mayfair but these were still the hours of cleaners doing their minimum-wage work before the day began.

  ‘Is that him inside?’ Layla said. ‘The murderer?’

  ‘What are you even doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Is that the man who killed my grandfather? The one you’ve got locked up?’

  ‘Did some journalist call you?’

  ‘Edie,’ she said. She glanced at the doors. ‘Edie sent me a text. Edie said you got him.’ Her eyes shone with tears. ‘She thought I’d be happy.’

  I sighed and shook my head and sat down on the steps next to her. I was still wearing my stab-proof vest. I undid the straps and exhaled as though I hadn’t breathed all night.

  ‘Edie shouldn’t be calling you about this stuff.’

  ‘She’s trying to be kind.’

  ‘I know. She cares about you. She still shouldn’t be doing it.’

  And then Edie was there.

  ‘Hey,’ she said softly, leaning over Layla and pushing back her long black hair from her face. There was a fading red scuffmark high up on one cheekbone where her grandmother had slapped her after we had brought her home from the park.

  She sat down on the other side of the girl. Edie took her hands.

  ‘And is it him?’ Layla said.

  Edie looked at me and I shook my head at all of it. Her sending text messages to this kid. The young man we had down in the cells. The wrong-headed certainty of Whitestone.

  ‘They think it’s him,’ Edie said carefully. ‘The SIO – Senior Investigating Officer – thinks it is him.’

  Still holding hands with Edie, Layla studied my face.

  ‘And what? You don’t think it’s him? Why not?’

  ‘We’ll see, OK? The man they brought in, he is going to say that he was somewhere else when your grandfather died. And then we are going to see if it’s true or not.’

  ‘And if he didn’t do it, then we will keep looking until we find the man that really did murder your gran
dfather,’ Edie said. ‘I promise you, OK?’

  ‘OK, Edie.’

  ‘But go home now, Layla,’ I said. ‘Nothing is going to happen quickly today.’

  ‘It’s the man who was always outside our house, isn’t it?’ she said to Edie, and I saw how terrifying it must have been for this teenage girl to look out her window at the crowds that gathered every night on Borodino Street.

  ‘The one with the haircut,’ Layla said. ‘The one who was making the speeches every night until they cleared the flowers away. They put him on television and YouTube and all that, and then there were more of them.’

  She let go of Edie’s hands and ran her fingers through her hair, the streaks of red dye reminding me of the face-painting of young children, it was as playfully inept as that, and that is when I saw the marks on her wrists, the thin white cuts that had healed and been opened again and again and again, the tell-tale bracelets of self-harm. And Edie saw them too.

  She seized Layla’s hands and would not let her pull them away, dragging the sleeves of her cheap leather jacket halfway up her forearms.

  ‘This,’ Edie said, ‘is not what your grandfather would have wanted for you, Layla. To see you hurting yourself would have broken his heart. And you know that, don’t you?’

  A big sergeant came out of 27 Savile Row, yawning widely in the bright new day. He glanced at the three of us sitting on the steps and then slowly walked away, ready for his bed. Layla Khan hung her head, the tears rolling down her face.

  ‘Did he really say my name at the end? Is that true?’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said.

  ‘You were the best thing in his life, Layla,’ Edie said. ‘His sons – your uncles, your dad – caused him nothing but misery and grief and pain. But you made him happy, Layla. So wipe your nose. You were the good thing in his life. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  They smiled at each other.

  I looked at the red scuffmark on Layla’s face and I wondered what the hell was going to happen to this child.

  23

  I was home before Scout woke up.

  The meat market was over for the night. The dancers at Fabric were all tucked up in bed. The first of the office workers were loading up with fuel in Smiths of Smithfield. And maybe it was my imagination, but among the locals I felt a palpable sense of excitement.

  It was the last day of the school year.

  I collected our mail – Boxing Monthly, Your Dog, offers of free pizza and an official-looking letter from a firm I had never heard of – and took the steps to our loft two at a time.

  Mrs Murphy and Stan were foggy-eyed. The Cavalier stretched like a little furry four-legged lord and idly smacked his lips as Mrs Murphy prepared his breakfast.

  ‘Everything all right?’ she said. ‘Everybody still in one piece?’

  I thought of the young bearded copper with a cracked skull. PC Sykes.

  ‘No fatalities,’ I said, and she was happy with that.

  Scout was not up yet so, after Stan had wolfed down his Nature’s Menu breakfast, Mrs Murphy took him for his walk while I brewed myself a pot of strong black coffee.

  Anthony Joshua was on the cover of Boxing Monthly.

  ‘The Misunderstood Staffie’ was on the cover of Your Dog.

  And I confirmed that it was really my name and address on the envelope that said Butterfield, Hunt and West – Solicitors.

  Scout bounded into the room, barefoot and still in her pyjamas, her long brown hair flying. She was grinning from ear to ear and suddenly I remembered exactly what the last day of the summer term felt like when I was that age.

  ‘So is today better than Christmas?’ I asked her, scooping her up, and smelling that Scout scent of sugar and shampoo.

  She laughed. ‘It’s very close!’

  She squirmed away from me and I gently put her down.

  ‘We’re all going to do our hair!’ she said. ‘Because it’s a special day! We’re going to do our hair like – you know – the Angry Princess.’

  ‘But I thought you grew out of the Angry Princess.’

  ‘I did. We have. But we thought it would be fun if we all did our hair like the Angry Princess for the last day of the year. Can we? Can I?’

  The nostalgia of seven-year-old girls. They could feel the world turning, too. Even at that age they could sense the seasons slipping by. To me it only felt like five minutes ago since we were watching The Angry Princess in a packed cinema. But Scout and her friends missed her already as a long-lost part of their childhood.

  ‘Sure, Scout.’

  I was reaching for the cereal, milk and cutlery. Scout was looking at me expectantly. A small cloud passed across her face.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Angel?’

  ‘But you have to do it for me. You have to do my hair. Like – you know – the Angry Princess.’

  My spirits sank. The Angry Princess was animated royalty. As I recalled, Her Majesty wore her hair up – an impossible pile of golden curls and swirls sitting on top of her head that was then allowed to drop into her eyes in carefully tousled tendrils.

  So it was sort of up but falling down. I looked at Scout’s tangled mess of long brown hair, with just a slight natural kink in it. And I did not know where to begin.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  Scout brightened.

  ‘I’ll get the hairclips, comb, brush and all that stuff,’ she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.

  By the time Mrs Murphy returned, my daughter was white-faced with shock. She was sitting in front of the mirror with what looked like a small collapsed hedge on top of her head. My attempt to replicate the coiffure of an animated princess had failed miserably.

  Mrs Murphy laughed. ‘Let me,’ she said.

  Scout and I smiled with gratitude. Mrs Murphy combed Scout’s hair straight, deftly piled it up on top of her and, as if by magic, pinned it in place. Scout was a dead ringer for the Angry Princess.

  I was smiling as I opened the letter from Butterfield, Hunt & West.

  Dear Sir,

  Our client, Mrs Anne Lewis (née Wolfe), has instructed us to obtain a child arrangements court order pertaining to the residency of her daughter, Scout Wolfe. The court will arrange a directions hearing which you will be obliged to attend. You will shortly be contacted by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) for an interview prior to the court hearing …

  I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

  I didn’t understand what any of it meant.

  None of it. Not a word. Who were these people? What did they have to do with our life?

  Mrs Murphy was putting the finishing touches to Scout’s hair.

  Scout smiled at me and I smiled back.

  ‘I like your hair,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  We had breakfast and then Scout brushed her teeth and got into her grass-stained summer dress without one hair on her head even moving. We both thanked Mrs Murphy for her hairdressing skills and then I took Scout to school.

  Some people have said to me that I was both mum and dad to my daughter. But the truth was that every day of my life I was confronted with the hard fact that I would never be a mother to her.

  It was tough enough just trying to be a father.

  I went up to Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, the Crime Museum of the Metropolitan Police, also known as the Black Museum.

  Visits to Room 101 were meant to be strictly by appointment only – the happy days when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was given his own set of keys were long gone – but over the years I had often come here when I did not know where else to turn.

  The Crime Museum is cold, dark and full of secrets, ranging from the casework on the Jack the Ripper investigation to the remains of the drone that brought down the Air Ambulance helicopter on Lake Meadows. The faces of the dead stared at me from the darkness. Some of them were familiar – the old gangs of London, the Krays, the Richardsons and the Warboys – and some were the smiling
faces of victims, who the world rarely remembers so well.

  One living face loomed out of the Room 101’s twilight. Sergeant John Caine, curator of the Crime Museum, was a detective with thirty years’ service on his face and not a gram of flab on his body.

  ‘Put the kettle on, son,’ he told me. ‘I’ll just finish off here.’

  John was showing around a dozen young recruits from the police academy at Hendon. They were about to finish their training and there is no place better than the Crime Museum – valued as much as a training facility as a museum by the Met – for an understanding how every day at work would put them in harm’s way.

  ‘We call it The Job but it’s not a job,’ John was telling their serious young faces. ‘You will run towards danger when others are running away from it, and your training and your trust in your colleagues will enable you to do this without hesitation. You will put yourself in harm’s way to protect people you will never know and you will do it every day of your lives. We call it The Job but when one of us falls then we mourn like a family.’ He paused to smile at them. ‘Take care of yourself and each other out there. Thank you and goodbye.’

  They gave him a round of applause.

  When they had filed out he came into the small office that acts as a lobby to the Crime Museum proper.

  ‘I’ve got some chocolate digestives,’ he said. ‘What’s on your mind – this nutter Bad Moses?’

  I shook my head and gave him the letter from Butterfield, Hunt & West. I knew that John had his own grown-up children and I knew that not all of them had managed to keep their marriages together. And I didn’t know who else to ask.

  ‘What does it mean, John?’

  He read it through and handed it back to me.

  The kettle began to boil.

  ‘Your ex-wife wants your daughter,’ he said. ‘And she is going to fight you like hell for her.’

  ‘Thanks for joining us,’ Whitestone told me when I walked into the MIR-1. ‘We’re charging George Halfpenny and I would like you to do the honours, Max.’

  Whitestone and I got the lift down to the custody suite.

  She did not say much.

  But she said enough.

  George Halfpenny was sitting on the little bed that is built low to the ground so you can’t fall off and hurt yourself. That struck me as bitterly ironic as the custody sergeant locked the door behind us.