Girl On Fire

by Tony Parsons

  A long rusty bayonet had been thrust through his feet and the short sword that fixed his left palm to the floor looked medieval. But the dagger that pierced the palm of his right hand had a black wooden handle with a runic SS symbol and an eagle above a swastika. There were faded words on the blade.

  ‘My honour is loyalty,’ I said. ‘Motto of the Waffen-SS. Currently banned in all the European countries that still remember.’

  The blades all looked as though they were from the same collection as the knife that killed Ahmed Khan, the Hitler Youth dagger with Blut und Ehre – Blood and honour – on the blade.

  ‘How long has he been dead?’ someone said.

  Jackson shook his head, on his hands and knees, still pressing Fenn’s chest, but slowing now. Then he stopped and got to his feet.

  For a long moment all you could hear was the chatter on the Airwave radios.

  And then the crucified man screamed.

  I bent by his side as they shouted for the paramedics on the radio.

  ‘Listen to me, Fenn,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. What happened to those two Croatian grenades? What happened to them?’

  ‘The brothers …’

  ‘It’s true? You sold them to the Khans?’

  ‘Help me.’

  Jackson was dragging me away.

  ‘Christ, Max! Talk to him at the hospital!’

  ‘He’s not going to make it to any hospital!’

  Jackson shoved my chest. His shots were on their knees, trying to get the blades out of Fenn’s hands and feet.

  ‘Get away from him, Max!’

  I went into the bedroom, trying to control my breathing.

  There were footsteps behind me.

  Jesse Tibbs had followed me. He was still holding the shotgun.

  ‘So someone did this Fenn creature because he was an informer, right?’ he said. ‘Lesson for us all. What does it say in the Bible? Thou shalt not bear false witness.’

  ‘Someone did him because he was a scumbag who made a living selling weapons to other scumbags. That’s what happened. It’s not difficult, Tibbs. Even you should be able to grasp it.’

  ‘No,’ Tibbs insisted. ‘Fenn bore false witness against his friends.’ He leaned against the doorway, the Benelli shotgun cocked at that 45 degree angle. ‘Like you with Ray Vann.’

  And suddenly I had had enough of him.

  ‘Is it always all talk with you, Jesse, or are you ever going to do something? You’re like one of these little boys on social media – all mouth and Apple mouse. Be a man, Jesse. If you are going to do it, then get it done.’

  He smiled, and we both nodded, as if something had finally been decided.

  He slowly raised his shotgun.

  And then Jackson Rose was standing behind him.

  Tibbs turned away.

  ‘Any weapons?’ Jackson said, addressing Tibbs but looking at me.

  ‘There’s enough firepower to start a small war under the floorboards in the kitchen,’ Tibbs said. ‘But no sign of any grenades. Croatian or anything else. Maybe the search team will dig them out.’

  Jackson nodded and stood aside to let Tibbs leave the room.

  ‘You can talk to Fenn as soon as they’ve stabilised him at the hospital, Max.’

  ‘That’s going to be too late, Jackson.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Best I can do, Max,’ he said. ‘You can’t interview a man when he is being crucified.’

  I barged past him. The paramedics were giving Fenn oxygen in the living room when I walked out. Edie Wren was waiting down in that fly-blown courtyard, sitting on the sofa that someone had set fire to. She was still wearing her PASGT helmet but she had pushed it on to the back of her head.

  There was a can of fizzy drink in her hand. She had found the child’s parents, or at least she had found the one that was still around.

  ‘A kid that age shouldn’t be drinking this crap,’ she said, pouring it on the ground and then kicking the can away, and I smiled for the first time that day.

  The shots went back to Leman Street.

  We went back to West End Central.

  Peter Fenn died on his way to the hospital.

  The search team tore his neat little two-bedroom shrine to Nazi Germany to pieces.

  And they still did not find those grenades.

  31

  ‘So is Stan going to die?’ Scout said.

  She was home for the weekend. And I think to both of us the loft in Smithfield still felt like Scout’s home.

  We stood in the doorway of my bedroom, watching Stan as he huddled in his basket where I had placed it by the side of the bed. He was unmoving but his eyes were open and shining, and he appeared to be waiting for whatever happened next.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something bit him when we were on the Heath and his body reacted against it.’

  ‘Anaphylactic shock,’ Scout said. ‘I saw it online. What does Christian say?’

  Scout and I both trusted Christian. Our local vet had looked after Stan since our dog was a capering puppy, wild-eyed with joy and agog with wonder at the world, stunned by the scents of the meat market, relieving himself with gay abandon in every corner of our loft. These are the things that you remember when you think your time with a dog is coming to the end.

  ‘Christian says rest, water and a bland diet,’ I said. ‘Although right now he’s not eating anything at all. Give him time, Christian says.’

  Scout sat on the floor with her dog and she ran her hands through his fur. Stan lifted his head as if to acknowledge her presence, his black diamond eyes settling on her face before he curled up again.

  ‘Can’t you put him in your bed?’ Scout said.

  ‘The bed’s too high for him if he needs a drink of water.’ In the distance I could hear the sounds of a summer day in the city. ‘I was going to take you rowing on the Serpentine today. But I don’t like to leave him when he is like this.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Scout said.

  So we stayed home all day. Me and Scout and Stan.

  The sun crossed the sky and we did not stir from our loft. As the hot, lazy day drifted by, Stan’s condition did not change but our sadness seemed to lift a little.

  There were visitors.

  Scout’s friend Mia was delivered by her mother and the two girls sat side by side on the floor, drawing for hours. Mrs Murphy came round to see Scout and check on Stan. Smiths of Smithfield sent up sandwiches.

  In the afternoon Stan made a guest appearance in the main space of the loft when I carried him wrapped in a blanket to his favourite sofa. He still didn’t move but he seemed to be happy surrounded by all the familiar faces. Stan’s love for people, especially children, was gleaming in those eyes.

  And then my ex-wife came to collect Scout and the day fell apart.

  Anne was dressed for the gym and she was pressed for time, throwing anxious glances at her iPhone.

  ‘How was the rowing?’ she said. ‘I bet Hyde Park was crowded, wasn’t it? Come on, Scout. Get your things.’

  ‘We stayed home,’ Scout said. ‘And we took care of Stan.’

  ‘All day long? On a beautiful day like today, you stayed inside this loft with a sick dog?’

  She made it sound like a crime against nature.

  ‘Yes,’ Scout said, her voice getting smaller.

  Now Anne was looking at me, struggling to hold her temper.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she said. ‘One day of the week you get her and she spends it locked up in here with a flea-bitten mutt.’

  She cast a contemptuous glance at Stan, bundled up on the sofa.

  The dog blinked, looking sorry for himself.

  Scout gave him a brief peck on the forehead and I was never more proud of her.

  ‘Don’t kiss the bloody thing,’ Anne said.

  ‘He’s not a bloody thing,’ Scout said, finding her voice. ‘He’s Stan and he’s a living, human creature!’

  Not quite human, of course.

  But I took he
r point.

  Anne’s iPhone came alive in her fist. She listened, sighed, held the phone away from her.

  ‘Just stick it in the bloody microwave, Oliver!’ she bawled.

  I was glad that Mrs Murphy and Mia had gone home. I did not want them to see this angry woman in her gym kit who did not comprehend how loving a dog could break your heart.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Stan is very ill.’

  But why should she understand? Stan had come into our life after Anne had left it. When she was on her leafy suburban street where nothing bad ever happened, with a new man and a new home and a new baby growing inside her, I had attempted to replace the hole in Scout’s life – and my life – with a puppy.

  Something Scout and I loved had been lost forever and we did our best to replace it with something that would love us with the unconditional, unchanging love that we both missed and craved.

  And it had worked. We were a rescue family.

  And the dog saved us.

  Anne touched her daughter’s hair.

  ‘Don’t be sad, darling. They don’t live forever, do they? We’ll get you a hamster or – I don’t know – a goldfish. I’m sure you can get them online.’

  ‘I don’t want a hamster.’

  Scout was struggling to put on the new rucksack I had bought her and Anne instinctively helped her, the gesture of a woman who was used to being around much smaller children.

  I wanted to explain what was happening here. I wanted to tell Anne that love and illness and death are never small things, that they can never be treated with contempt and disdain. Not even in a hamster. And certainly not in a dog.

  I wanted to tell her something that she seemed yet to learn – that there is always a price to pay for loving something or someone.

  But I did not have the words.

  I did not know where to begin.

  Because I realised that I did not know this woman collecting my daughter. We were strangers now.

  No, it was worse than that.

  We did not even like each other.

  Married for a while, I thought. Divorced forever.

  ‘You have to understand,’ I said. ‘Stan is part of our family.’

  ‘No,’ my ex-wife told me. ‘Scout has a new family now.’

  Then they were gone but I felt closer to my daughter than ever.

  We choose to love, I thought. We choose to open our hearts and pay the price of having them smashed to pieces.

  And it is worth it, I thought.

  The bill is always worth it, even if it cripples us, even if it scars us, even if it kills us.

  I was sitting on the sofa with the new issue of Boxing Monthly and my sick, sleeping dog when my doorbell rang.

  It was close to midnight. The neighbourhood was jumping. But nobody should have been ringing my doorbell at this hour.

  I went to the door and looked on the monitor that showed the street.

  Edie Wren was standing outside my front door.

  And somehow I was not surprised.

  It was as if I had been waiting for this moment for years.

  I buzzed her up.

  We stood there looking at each other for a moment and then it was as if we made up our minds at exactly the same time.

  She crossed the threshold and she came to my arms and our mouths found each other and they fit, they fit in a way that very few mouths will ever fit your mouth in the course of a lifetime.

  Then I held her against me, filled with wonder, and she was warm from the day and the heat was rising in me and I wanted to kiss her again right now.

  My green-eyed girl.

  ‘Max?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know how we can sleep tonight,’ Edie said.

  32

  We walked into MIR-1 and TDC Joy Adams was sitting on a workstation looking up at Scarlet Bush.

  Edie jabbed a finger at the journalist.

  ‘She can’t be in here,’ she said. ‘Are you nuts, Joy? We’re conducting an active murder enquiry in here.’

  Joy jumped down from the workstation.

  ‘You need to hear this,’ she said.

  We all stared at Scarlet Bush. She looked older than I remembered. The strain and stress of working in a declining industry, I guessed.

  ‘I know where the poison comes from,’ she said.

  And we let her talk.

  ‘The Khan brothers were thugs,’ Scarlet said. ‘All three of them. Adnan, Assad and Ahmed, the one who died in Syria, Layla’s father. Thugs and losers. Their digital footprint on social media suggests non-stop party animals and petty criminals. And then suddenly they are joining the global jihad. And then they are bringing down a helicopter in London. And dying in shoot-outs in the East End with armed police officers. And Ahmed – the one we never met – is dead in some bloodstained sandbox in Syria. It doesn’t add up, does it? One minute they are sucking on a spliff in Ilford and knocking back the vodka shots and wondering if their benefits will stretch to one more pole dance. Then all at once all three of them are willing to kill and die for jihad? It makes no sense.’

  ‘No, it makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s shockingly common. Life’s losers latching on to something far bigger than themselves – it happens all the time, Scarlet, especially if there’s a history of violence, drug use or mental illness.’

  ‘True. But I stick to my original theory – the poison still has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?’

  I shrugged. ‘Sit in front of your computer for long enough every day and you can convince yourself of anything,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s more than that. And I can prove it.’

  There was a manila envelope on the workstation.

  She took out a photograph of three men.

  A westerner in a suit and two men in shalwar kameez, the traditional long shirt and baggy trousers of the northwest frontier of Pakistan. One of the Pakistanis was in his sixties. The other was around thirty, and cradling an assault rifle.

  ‘This was taken in the Services Bureau in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1981, around a year after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,’ Scarlet said. ‘It appeared next to an op-ed in the New York Times predicting that Afghanistan was going to be the Vietnam of the Russians. The westerner is from the US Embassy in Islamabad and, I would guess, CIA. The older Pakistani is from the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, who backed the rebels who were resisting the Soviet invasion and occupation. And the younger man is one of the rebels.’

  ‘The mujahideen,’ I said.

  ‘The mujahideen – Arabic for those who struggle and strive for a cause worthy of praise. Those engaged in holy war. Because they weren’t terrorists back then. They were plucky freedom fighters taking on the wicked Reds. They were our brave Muslim allies. That’s why these three men are smiling for the camera. The west couldn’t help them enough.’

  She touched the old photograph.

  ‘All of this is hotly denied now, of course,’ she said. ‘Because one of the mujahideen who helped set up this Services Bureau was a Saudi Arabian called Osama bin Laden. But the ISI and the CIA provided arms, money and training to anyone who resisted the Russian invaders. Anyone. They didn’t ask for character references. Radical Muslims were not a threat to the west back then – they were on the same side as us.’

  She placed her fingertip on the image of the man with the assault rifle.

  ‘That’s an AK-74 assault rifle captured from Spetsnaz – the Russian Special Forces. The AK-74 was a big status symbol. Bin Laden had one just like it. It’s the gun you see with bin Laden in every photo opportunity. People think it’s an AK-47. But the AK-74 was designed thirty years later.’

  ‘And who is he?’ I said.

  ‘His name is Hamid Jat. He had a sister who came to London to get married in her teens. And her name is Azza.’

  ‘Azza Khan?’ I said. ‘The man with the gun is her brother?’

  We stared at the photograph.

 
; ‘So you’re suggesting the Khan brothers took up terror because their dear old Uncle Hamid fought the Russians in Afghanistan?’ I said. ‘Sorry, Scarlet. I don’t buy it.’

  ‘I am saying that it is an unbroken line,’ she said. ‘I am saying this family has armed resistance in their DNA, Max. I am saying that the poison was in them from the start. But they wouldn’t see it as poison. They would see it as – I don’t know. Defending their faith. Standing up to the non-believers. A cause worth dying for. Look, modern terror has its starting point in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. But now they don’t wait for your commanding officer to give you your orders to attack a Russian tank. You buy a drone online, fly it above a shopping mall that’s on a flight path to Heathrow, and cross your fingers. But the mujahideen are the vanguard of modern terror, the roots of jihad without borders. And the Khan brothers would have known all about Uncle Hamid because it’s like having a war hero in your family. Their mother – Hamid’s sister – would have told them all about him. And they would have been proud of him.’

  ‘You know who I blame for all that death and destruction, all those broken bodies and lives?’ Edie said. ‘I blame them. The bastards who killed Alice Stone. The scumbags who stuck that drone in the sky.’ She nodded at the photograph. ‘Not some beardy old bloke wearing a dress in 1981.’

  Scarlet shook her head, and I wondered if she had written her story already. And I wondered why she had come to us before running it.

  ‘This man Hamid Jat – and all the men like him – were an inspiration to the Khan brothers and their kind,’ Scarlet said. ‘Because they believed that the mujahideen inflicted the death wound that killed the Soviet Union. And they believe that if they can draw America into another war just like it, then the United States – and the western world – will die too.’

  We thought about it in silence.

  ‘It’s not complicated,’ Scarlet insisted. ‘The Khan brothers believe the end is nigh for the wicked west. They believe we will fall just as the Russians fell. Their worldview is a virus that has been around for decades. We think it’s a modern phenomenon but there is nothing remotely modern about it. The nature of the beast changed, that’s all. In the Eighties it was a conventional army, fighting the Russians. And now it is leaderless resistance, sustained by an idea, fighting the west. And the mother of the Khan brothers is the link between then and now.’