Girl On Fire

by Tony Parsons

  ‘But she’s the poison,’ Whitestone said. ‘You know she is, Flashman. Scarlet Bush was right. It all comes back to her. Her sons were standard weed-smoking failed DJs on benefits who had their tiny minds turned to jihad. And all the poison comes from her – and all the old bigots just like her who are never the ones to use the knife, or drive the van into pedestrians or detonate the suicide vest.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I know all of that. And I said to her – If it is so horrible living among all of us drinking, fornicating, freedom-loving kaffirs, then why don’t you go and live in a Muslim country, darling? And do you know what she said to me?’

  ‘Don’t call me darling,’ guessed Joy.

  ‘After that,’ Flashman said. ‘She told me – But why should I go to live in another country when every country belongs to Allah?’ But as far as CTU can tell, she has never invited and encouraged support for a proscribed organisation in violation of the Terrorism Act. I can’t prosecute her for believing what she wants to believe. It’s a free country.’

  Flashman stood up, stretched and yawned.

  ‘So we’ll keep an eye on her,’ he said. ‘Of course we will. Azza Khan will be a person of interest for a little while, until another few thousand new persons of interest come along. We’ll do our best, all right? You want me to lock her up when she hasn’t broken any laws? When there’s been no criminal offence? What about her human rights? I’m shocked, truly shocked.’

  He left us.

  Whitestone looked at me. ‘I always liked the wrong brother for the Bad Moses murders,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Max.’

  ‘Easy mistake to make,’ I said. ‘But all they shared was that haircut. The brothers could hardly have been more different. For all the racket on social media, Richard – Bad Moses – was always just a simple-minded, violent thug who had found a cause big enough for all his frustration and hatred. It made him closer to the Khan brothers than he ever realised. But I don’t think George Halfpenny hated anyone. I think George loved this country and thought it was worth preserving. He had thought about things when he was pedalling that rickshaw around the city. He had his set of beliefs and, for the first time in his life, people were listening to him.’

  ‘And now he’s going down for what he did to PC Sykes,’ Whitestone said. ‘Which is a tragedy for the Sykes family and for George himself. He might have got out from behind that rickshaw and done something with his life.’

  ‘You never know,’ I said.

  ‘And how are you doing?’ Whitestone said.

  My knee ached when the weather turned cold. My ribs were bruised. My intercostal muscles – the ones that lift the ribcage every time you breathe in and out – felt like they were torn. Some of my nerve ends still rattled and jangled and jumped about with a will of their own, sparking with the afterglow of the 50,000 volts of power that had recently passed through them.

  But the last of the summer sunshine was shining on my city. Scout was coming home. Our dog Stan had long, good years to live. And Edie was at her workstation and already packing her bag because it was a slow day at the office. She smiled at me and ran her fingers through her red hair.

  ‘Never been better, boss,’ I said.

  37

  We were in Edie’s one-bedroom flat above a junk shop on the cheap side of Highbury Corner. She was all boxed up and ready to go. Today was the day we started living together.

  The removal men had just left and we would not see them again until Charterhouse Street, when we met them outside the block of flats directly opposite the main entrance of the old meat market.

  Outside our home.

  Edie sealed the duct tape on a cardboard box of CDs and books and turned to face me.

  ‘Are you sure about this, Max?’

  ‘Let me think,’ I said.

  I touched my mouth against her mouth.

  The fit was uncanny. I mean, I doubt if there was another pair of mouths in the world that fit together quite so well.

  ‘But we’ll be one of those families,’ she said, pulling away. ‘We’ll be blended! I know Scout likes me but maybe not so much when I’m at the breakfast table.’

  I pulled her close again. Everything fit. Not just our mouths. Sometimes you just know where you belong. And when you know – really know – where you belong, then you don’t need to know anything else.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘That’s what we’ll be.’ I kissed her one last time. ‘Now let’s go home, Edie.’

  We carried the few remaining boxes down to the old BMW X5.

  The street was empty apart from a woman in a full black burka walking down the middle of the road, carrying a pink and purple rucksack in her right hand, an Angry Princess bag, the bright splash of childish purple and pink colours standing out starkly against the funereal robes.

  The curve her face – or what I could see of it – was familiar.

  Because the woman was Layla Khan.

  And I had seen that rucksack before.

  I had seen it on that first day in Borodino Street.

  And I saw it all clearly at last, I saw what had been there all along, staring me in the face, and I knew it was true even before Layla reached into the rucksack.

  ‘Max?’ Edie said. ‘That’s Layla, isn’t it?’

  She began to walk towards the girl.

  And I knew now how the two Croatian hand grenades had left the house on Borodino Street. I knew with complete certainty that Azza Khan had stuffed them into the merchandise of last summer’s Hollywood hit animated movie, and that she had carried them out in The Angry Princess bag through the armed officers ushering them to safety.

  ‘Get back inside,’ I called to Edie.

  But she had already left me and now she was walking slowly towards the figure in black.

  They drew closer. They stopped. They faced each other, close enough to reach out and touch.

  ‘Layla,’ Edie said.

  ‘We destroy your buildings,’ she said.

  There was something in her hands.

  In both of her hands.

  They looked like death – black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. I was not close enough to read the name of the manufacturer on the side. But I knew what it said. Cetinka, it said, on those two grenades that should have been destroyed at the end of someone else’s war twenty years ago.

  ‘Edie!’ I screamed.

  ‘But you destroy our countries,’ Layla said.

  ‘This is your country,’ Edie said, and I saw her wrap her arms around Layla Khan with infinite tenderness, hugging her as Layla Khan removed the pins from first one Croatian grenade and then the other.

  The sunlight caught the metal pins as they bounced on the sun-baked concrete of the little street.

  Edie held her tight and smiled into Layla’s face, but I no longer recognised that face, it was someone I had never seen, the poison was in her now, and then I was thrown backwards without hearing the first explosion, or the second explosion, only the muffled sound of the air being forced asunder with astonishing violence, and then the echo of the rendering, like the sound of a door being slammed a thousand miles below the earth.

  I was on my back.

  I could hear what I first thought was falling rain, and then realised it was the sound of breaking glass dropping from shattered window panes the length of the street.

  I looked around.

  The broken bodies of the two women lay together in the middle of the road. A patch of red hair fell across the ghost white face of Edie Wren. I called her name, and it was a noise that came from a place inside me that I did not know existed, and it was the cry of something that had been smashed beyond repair.

  And at last I began to crawl.

  38

  The hospital was never silent, never dark, never sleeping.

  Even in the small hours, long after they had doled out the medication to get us through until dawn, there was the still yellow twilight of the hospit
al lights coming from the nurses station and the corridor, and there were still the noises that pulled me from my drugged and feverish sleep, like sounds from the underworld.

  The moans and the snoring of the sleeping. The groans and gasps of the distressed who were awake or asleep or somewhere in between. The murmured voices and soft laughter of the nurses at their station and the urgent slap-slap-slap of their rubber soles on the polished floors.

  And worst of all was the shattered soundtrack inside my head.

  I moved my weight to ease the pain in my legs that kept breaking through the fog of morphine and the only way that I knew for certain that I sometimes slept were the dreams that I glimpsed sliding away from consciousness upon the instant of waking.

  Fred was there, inside my head, approaching the bed with his long hair pulled up in a topknot, and his wicked pirate’s grin on his face.

  ‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he said.

  And Mrs Murphy was there at some point in the night, when there was unbroken darkness in the world outside with only the soft gloaming of the hospital lights to guide her.

  Mrs Murphy sat in the one seat of my small room and she turned her head towards me, Stan asleep at her feet. ‘You’ll have a cup of tea with your dinner,’ she predicted. And Sergeant John Caine came out of the shadows of the Black Museum, Room 101, New Scotland Yard.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.

  Then I slept some more and when I came round Jackson was there, the lone chair pulled up to my bedside. He patted my arm and I caught my breath, understanding that my oldest friend was really here and not inside my head.

  ‘You’ve got a bit of shrapnel in your legs,’ he said quietly. ‘But they still work. No worries. No problem.’ He gave me his grin. ‘A bit of shrapnel in the legs? Join the club.’

  I cleared my throat of the thick lump that clogged it.

  ‘Edie?’ I said.

  He patted my arm again.

  ‘Edie’s hanging in there, Max. The woman that did it died instantly.’

  The woman? He meant Layla Khan.

  ‘But Edie is still fighting,’ Jackson said. I watched him hesitate. ‘She’s not awake yet. But she’s a tough kid.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Scout?’ I said.

  He smiled and I saw the gap-toothed grin that I had been looking at all my life.

  ‘I spoke to Scout on the phone,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. She’s good. She’s fine. She wants you to get well. Nothing’s changed, OK? Scout’s coming home.’

  I closed my eyes and I was aware of every breath and I felt the tiny fragments of black metal in my lower legs.

  Edie was sleeping.

  Scout was coming home.

  And Layla Khan was dead.

  ‘Stan?’ I said.

  Jackson grinned.

  ‘Stan’s with Mrs Murphy and her family. Having the time of his life. Her grandchildren are spoiling him rotten. He will be waiting for you.’

  ‘Tibbs,’ I said. ‘Jesse.’

  It was not a question.

  ‘Jesse’s already back at work,’ he said. ‘Nobody blames him for topping a murderer with his own gun. How could they?’ Jackson shook his head. ‘Jesse was my fault. I should have just let the pair of you batter each other. Get it out of your system. The way they settled it in the old school. You’d be best mates by now. He was never going to slot you. The worst that would have happened is he would have given you a good hiding. Or you would have given him a good hiding. And I should have let it happen. Live and learn. Or hope we do, at least.’

  The morphine was closing my eyes, dragging me down.

  I felt Jackson pat my arm and I tumbled into the darkness.

  ‘Anything you need,’ he said. And then, ‘Don’t forget – you can make new friends but you can’t make old friends.’

  Or perhaps that last bit was just inside my head.

  And the dead also came to me that night.

  My parents were there at one point in my morphine sleep. And they were not young and they were not old, my mother and father, but they were exactly as I remembered them, they were totally themselves, the very essence of them, but on the other side of a glass-like wall that separated one world from the other, a wall that was higher than the sky, and conversation was not possible, not a word, even as I felt the love and the loss and the missing of them, the missing of them that I saw was with me every day of my life.

  And then George Halfpenny was there, in the one chair, reading his ancient paperback copy of Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P Taylor from the prison library, and I thought he must be among the dead, and I looked for the mark around his neck of the men who die in their prison cells, the livid death mark always a diagonal wound, cutting up towards his ear where the sheet or the belt or whatever it had been had angled up towards the knot. But the death mark was not on his neck and I knew that he was among the living, and I knew that George Halfpenny would live because he wanted to return to his brother Edward, the young man in a wheelchair, the brother who loved and needed him, who would always love and need him, and who made it impossible for George to do anything but cling to life.

  ‘Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness,’ he said, and I did not know if that was a quote from A. J. P. Taylor or George Halfpenny.

  I slept.

  I woke.

  It was still dark and more quiet than it had been at any point in the night. I listened for the slap-slap-slap of the rubber soles of the nurses as they went about their labours, and I listened for the sound of their voices, warm and amused and young, as they talked very softly at their station, and I listened too for the other patients tormented in their sleep.

  But I heard nothing.

  The night was still and silent and at peace with itself at last.

  And Edie was sitting at the window in her T-shirt and pants, the legs I loved tucked up under the butt that I loved and a concerned look on the face that I loved. She brushed back her red hair and fixed me with her green eyes.

  And she looked at me with endless sadness and she said not a word.

  Then it was morning and the ward was awake and the smell of breakfast in the hospital made me sick and made me think that I would never want food ever again.

  Joy Adams sat in the only chair, watching me carefully with her huge dark eyes, and Pat Whitestone stood by my bedside.

  My boss. She was holding my hand.

  ‘Edie,’ she said.

  ‘She’s a tough kid,’ I said.

  My voice was so hoarse it sounded like someone else but it was full of a grainy hope.

  ‘The bravest and the best,’ Whitestone said. ‘A very tough kid. But I have to tell you that Edie didn’t make it, Max.’

  I stared at her for a bit. I looked at Joy. There were tears running down her face. I looked back at Whitestone.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Edie never recovered consciousness.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘She slipped away in the night. She wouldn’t have felt any pain. Edie died doing the job she loved, Max.’

  ‘OK.’

  They went away after a while, because hospital beds always rob you of things to say, there is never anything to say in the end, no banal observation to be made, or sincere condolences to be offered, and there was breakfast and morphine to be taken or declined.

  The sky rolled across the sky and it felt for the first time that the night was coming in much faster, the days of our long summer running out at last, and that night no one came to me, not the living nor the dead, because they all leave you alone after a while, and I was wide and fully awake – the drugs no longer working – when I came at last to the dark and silent moment that you find in the still centre of every night, even when you are in a hospital bed.

  And that was when I pushed my face into the pillow and I wept for Edie Wren, and for myself, and for the children who would never be born.

  39

  The leaves were
turning the colour of our dog.

  Stan and I drove to the street where it looked like nothing bad had ever happened and I parked the old silver BMW X5 outside the house with the FOR SALE sign in the yard.

  We were neither early nor late. I had timed our arrival to the minute and as I put on the handbrake the door opened in a blur of adults and small children milling in the hallway, and at the centre of them all there was the face of my daughter.

  Scout was saying her goodbyes.

  I eased myself from the car, the pain in my lower legs flaring, the muscles still stiff with injury from the jagged black fragments of shrapnel that would be there forever. I reached across Stan to the well of the passenger seat to take my walking stick.

  When I straightened up by the side of the car, taking some of my weight on the stick, Scout was watching me, her face clouding over at the sight of her damaged old dad.

  We stared at each other and in the look that passed between us there was a glimpse of the distant future, a time that we would know fifty years from today, the time when the child becomes the carer and the parent is the cared for. That time was waiting for my daughter and me around a lifetime from today, and the summers would fly by, one by one, and there was nothing that either of us could do to stop it coming.

  Then the moment was gone. I took a faltering step up the garden path and paused, wincing with pain. And then it didn’t matter because I called my daughter’s name.

  And Scout ran to our car, and to her dog, and to my arms.

  TONY PARSONS

  I always knew that I would write. I knew that nothing would stop me. I always loved stories, I always found books engaged me like nothing else, and helped me to make sense of the world.