Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

  ‘No.’ Akhtar stood up. ‘ I’m running this bloody show and I decide what happens.’ He picked up the gun to emphasise his authority, but did not point it at her. He walked towards the shop then stopped in the doorway, calmer suddenly. ‘Anyway, we need to keep the phone free in case Thorne calls.’

  ‘I just wanted him to hear my voice,’ Helen said. ‘That’s all.’

  Akhtar looked at his feet for a while, then disappeared into the shop.

  Helen closed her eyes and lay down.

  A few minutes later, she could hear him crying again next door.

  Sue Pascoe emerged from the toilet cubicle and crossed to the row of small sinks to wash her hands and splash some water on her face. She smiled at seeing that someone had written ‘Wesley is a big knob’ in black felt-tip on the mirror. Wondered if Wesley, who could be no more than eleven, would have the wherewithal to change ‘is’ to ‘has’.

  It was the first time all day that she had found a few minutes to herself or thought about anything other than the job in hand.

  The first time she had smiled.

  She looked at her watch. It was now thirty hours since Javed Akhtar had taken two people hostage at gunpoint. Donnelly seemed happy enough with the way things were progressing, though in a situation such as this one, that only meant that nothing bad was happening. Chivers was still making noises about the need for advanced technical support and Pascoe knew there would soon be pressure from elsewhere to relax the cordon so as to ease traffic congestion in the area, or at least make an effort to get the station at Tulse Hill reopened.

  God forbid the commuters should suffer.

  As things stood, none of this was her concern, but it soon would be if the whispers about resolving the hostage situation as quickly as possible grew any louder. If Donnelly started to listen. Then it would become Helen Weeks’ concern too.

  She dried her face and brushed her hair. She groaned at the amount of grey coming through and determined to get back to the hairdresser’s as soon as she got the chance. She reapplied her lipstick, then stepped out into the school corridor feeling better. Passing one of the classrooms, she glanced in through the small window and saw a black woman talking animatedly to a WPC. The woman saw her and immediately stood up and walked towards the door.

  Pascoe swore quietly and braced herself. She knew Denise Mitchell had clocked her, that there was now no possibility of walking quickly away.

  The woman was pretty, with flawless skin and hair in cornrows, and she had begun talking before she had opened the door. ‘Look, nobody will tell me what the hell’s going on. I’m going mental stuck in here.’

  ‘Everybody’s doing everything they can,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ Denise said. ‘It feels like everyone’s rushing around with serious faces, but nothing’s actually happening.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Pascoe said. ‘Obviously if there was anything to tell you, I would.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Even if it was something I really didn’t want to hear?’ The woman’s eyes were suddenly wet. ‘Is that your job or do they give that one to somebody else?’

  ‘Look, I think perhaps you’d be a lot more comfortable staying elsewhere. Has anybody talked to you about a hotel?’

  A nod.

  ‘Don’t you think that would be a good idea?’

  ‘I don’t want to go on my own.’

  ‘What about family?’ Pascoe asked. ‘There must be somebody… ’

  ‘There’s just Steve.’ Denise reached into the sleeve of her sweater and drew out a used tissue. She lifted it towards her face then stopped and crushed it in her fist.

  ‘Everybody’s doing everything they can,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘Yeah, you keep saying that.’

  ‘Because it’s the truth.’

  ‘Really?’ The woman narrowed her eyes and stared at the Met Police badge on the lanyard around Pascoe’s neck. The WPC had appeared behind her in the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’

  Pascoe wondered if there was anything she could say that would make this woman feel better. I’m the one being paid to negotiate with the man who has your husband. I’m the one whose job it is to keep him alive.

  Denise Mitchell did not bother waiting for an answer. ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘Steve hasn’t done anything.’ Her voice cracked as she raised it. ‘You should stop talking about it and get him out of there, because he hasn’t done anything.’

  Now, Pascoe really had nothing to say.

  She watched as the WPC guided the woman back into the room, then turned and walked back towards the hall.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘You don’t appear to be with us today, Mr Jaffer… ’

  Rahim looked up and stared at his tutor. She waited, as though expecting an explanation for his lack of attention or perhaps a precis of the topic she and the other students had been discussing for the previous few minutes. All Rahim could do was mumble an apology, feeling the blood rush to his cheeks while some of the others around the table laughed and shook their heads. The woman began talking again and Rahim did his best to listen. He scribbled a few notes on a page that was already covered with meaningless doodles, but within a minute or two the pen grew heavy in his hand and the tutor’s words had become no more than background burble and hiss.

  So rack that fucking big brain of yours…

  Thorne’s words were still ringing loud and clear though, the expression on the policeman’s face vivid enough to tighten the cold and slippery knot in Rahim’s guts whenever he closed his eyes.

  I’m betting he had more than one secret.

  He was squeezing the pen so tightly that purplish half-moons of blood had formed beneath his fingernails. He cast his eyes in the direction of his tutor and told his head to nod, while he tried to regulate his breathing. To keep the anger in check. He was not a child any more, and he hated being made to feel like one. He resented feeling ashamed and fearful when he had left shame and fear behind him, locked away back in his parents’ house with the ugly carpets and the stink of patchouli.

  The other students laughed suddenly. One of his tutor’s bad jokes.

  He laughed along, while he sat there and told himself that none of this was his fault. Not what Amin’s stupid father was doing and not what had happened to Amin. He could never have foreseen that, or done anything to stop it, and nothing he could do or say now would change the fact that he was dead, would it?

  Dead was dead, even if there was no need to rack that big brain of his. Even though he knew exactly what Thorne was after. Dead was dead, whatever his parents and their priests might have taught him, and did it really make any difference to anyone except one policeman and a crazy old newsagent how it happened?

  Or why?

  He was your friend…

  Rahim looked up at the mention of his name. Saw the look of concern on his tutor’s face.

  ‘Perhaps you should go home,’ she said. ‘You really don’t look well.’

  He did not need a second invitation. He stood and gathered his books, said something about a virus and hurried from the room without bothering to close the door behind him.

  He was lucky that the toilet was only a few steps away.

  Ten seconds later his books and papers lay scattered on the floor of the cubicle, as he dropped to his knees, clutched at the edge of the bowl and threw up.

  Excited as he was by developments, Thorne had been at something of a loss as to where he should go after talking to Rahim Jaffer, so he decided to get some lunch. To share it with someone he could at least usefully discuss things with. It would not be the first time he had eaten in a mortuary, enveloped by the sounds and smells of the dead and those who worked on them. Thorne figured there were probably fewer germs around than in the average greasy spoon.

  Phil Hendricks shared the small office at Hornsey Mortuary with three other pathologists. In contrast to the state-of-the-art lab and post-mort
em suite along the corridor, the room was tired and grimy. Hendricks’ desk was as cluttered as usual with olive-green arch files and folders, the only flashes of bright colour provided by the columns of curling pink Post-it notes around the computer screen and the obligatory ‘Arsenal: Legends of the Seventies’ calendar pinned to the wall above.

  This month: Liam Brady with his 1979 FA Cup Winner’s medal.

  ‘So the kid was gay,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’d more or less worked that out anyway and it’s still not much of a motive.’

  ‘No?’ Thorne held out the plastic bag containing the selection of sandwiches and snacks he’d picked up from Tesco on the way. Hendricks rummaged around, finally plumped for the ham and cheese and a bottle of apple juice. ‘That was the one I wanted,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks said, ‘Good,’ went back into the bag again and fished out a packet of crisps. ‘OK, so there’s always a few morons who enjoy taking their problems out on people with better fashion sense than them, but as a rule I don’t think gay-bashers tend to be quite so… imaginative.’

  ‘It’s definitely part of it though.’ Thorne took out his own sandwich, opened a bottle of water. ‘There’s sex involved somewhere.’

  ‘You’re obsessed, mate.’

  ‘ Me? ’

  Hendricks had taken off his scrubs and was wearing jeans and a tight-fitting white T-shirt. Thorne took a quick inventory of the tattoos on display. There were none he could not recall seeing before, and as his friend usually celebrated each sexual conquest with a trip to the tattoo parlour, this probably meant that he wasn’t getting much action. It was always possible that there was a new tattoo somewhere Thorne couldn’t see it of course, but he doubted it. That would mean that Hendricks was getting his end away and keeping it to himself.

  And he never kept it to himself.

  ‘You thought about blackmail?’ Hendricks asked.

  ‘All the time,’ Thorne said. ‘Give me a thousand pounds or I’ll go on Facebook and tell all your friends you’re shit in bed.’

  Hendricks flashed a sarcastic grin, teeth full of ham and cheese.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve thought about it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘He sleeps with someone who’d rather it’s kept quiet, tries to squeeze them for money.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You might want to look at the Muslim angle again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They hate poofs even more than people who kill themselves.’ Hendricks took another bite of his sandwich. ‘“When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes.” Muhammad said that, apparently.’ He chewed for a few seconds. ‘I’m clearly not sleeping with the right men.’

  They said nothing for a minute or two. Sat and ate and listened to the noises of the mortuary. The distant clanging of freezer cabinets and the squeak of trolley wheels in the corridor outside.

  ‘This Rahim kid knows more than he’s telling me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Sounds like you put the wind up him.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Thorne aimed his empty water bottle at the metal bin in the corner and missed. ‘I haven’t got time to do things any other way.’

  ‘How’s that copper in the newsagent’s doing?’

  ‘Pretty well, I think,’ Thorne said. ‘She’s tougher than they think she is.’ He gathered the plastic packaging and empty crisp packets and shoved them into the plastic bag. ‘It’s that poor sod who works in a bank I feel sorry for. God knows how he’s holding up.’

  Thorne walked over and dropped the plastic bag into the bin. When he turned round, Hendricks was looking at him.

  ‘You spoken to Louise lately?’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘You?’

  He was not surprised when Hendricks nodded. He and Louise had grown extremely close in the two years she and Thorne were together and theirs was a relationship of gossip, whispers and in-jokes that had often made Thorne stupidly jealous. Had made him feel excluded. There were times when Thorne had resented his best friend coming between himself and Louise, and others, somewhat less comfortable to think about now, when he had felt as though Louise were the one doing the muscling in.

  ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s doing OK,’ Hendricks said. ‘I mean it’s not like you’re any great loss, is it?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘You should call her.’

  ‘Yeah, well she did accidentally manage to hang on to several of my Emmylou Harris albums.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Hendricks said.

  Thorne nodded and lifted his leather jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Listen, about this drugs thing.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Hendricks said, mock-offended. ‘There was I thinking you’d just dropped in to have lunch.’

  ‘A working lunch,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I told you, I’d get on it.’

  ‘When, Phil?’

  ‘Look, I just need to find a few hours to get my nose into a couple of books,’ Hendricks said. He nodded towards the computer keyboard. ‘Spend some time on the internet.’

  ‘Soon as you can, eh?’

  Hendricks pointed to the door, the post-mortem suite beyond. ‘Sorry, mate, I’ve been a bit bloody busy. RTA on the Seven Sisters Road yesterday. Multiple fatalities.’

  ‘They’re not going anywhere,’ Thorne said.

  While Kitson brought him up to speed with the day’s developments, Russell Brigstocke – ever the keen amateur magician – sat with a deck of cards, practising fancy cuts and shuffles. He listened intently while Kitson talked him through the interview with Peter Allen, the movement of the cards between his fingers helping him to relax and calm down after the call he had received ten minutes earlier from Martin Dawes’ commanding officer.

  ‘I just thought we should “touch base” on this Amin Akhtar thing,’ the man had said. That one phrase alone had been enough to tell Brigstocke the kind of pompous tosser he was dealing with. ‘From the sound of it, your DI is doing his level best to discredit the original inquiry, which I think is a real shame. It’s not going to make him very popular and if he’s not careful it’s going to make my team look rather silly.’

  ‘I think you’ve already made a decent job of that yourselves.’

  Now, Brigstocke’s opposite number knew what kind of man he was dealing with. ‘Let’s not make this about scoring points,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, I must have got the wrong end of the stick.’

  ‘I’m thinking about the Murder Command London-wide. The Met in general, if it comes to that. Nobody’s going to come out of this well, certainly not once the media get hold of it.’

  ‘Oh, I think you might come out of it a bit worse than anybody else,’ Brigstocke said. ‘From the sound of it, your DI should start thinking about traffic duty.’

  ‘That’s not exactly helpful.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’

  ‘Look, if you’re not willing to listen, I’m perfectly happy to go over your head.’

  ‘Fill your boots,’ Brigstocke said. ‘In the meantime I’ll pass your concerns on to DI Thorne, but I think he’s got one or two more important things to worry about at the moment.’

  ‘OK, well I was hoping you might be reasonable, but-’

  ‘Really? I thought you were just touching base?’

  ‘I can see where this bolshy DI of yours gets his attitude from.’

  ‘Come back and talk to me when you’re a superintendent,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Actually, I’ll still tell you to piss off!’

  Kitson had laughed when Brigstocke told her about the call. Said, ‘Tom would be very proud.’

  Brigstocke fanned out the cards on the desk in front of him, flipped them and brought the deck back together. ‘So, is he on to something, do you reckon? I mean, I know what’s going on down there is important and I’m happy for you and Dave to go chasing around for him, but you do have other cases.’

  ‘Difficult to tell,’ Kitson said. ‘He sounds excited, but that might just be panic.’


  Brigstocke picked up his cards and dropped them into a drawer. ‘It’s not very often I feel sorry for him,’ he said. ‘But Thorne’s under the cosh with this one, because Akhtar’s made it all about him. If anything happens to that woman he’s holding… ’

  ‘It won’t be Tom’s fault.’

  ‘Good luck trying to tell Tom that.’

  They both turned as Holland knocked on the already open door and stepped inside. ‘We’ve got a hit on Rahim Jaffer,’ he said. ‘A strange one.’

  Brigstocke looked at Kitson. Said, ‘Call Thorne.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  For the final briefing before the call that was scheduled for four o’clock, they gathered in a small room behind the stage in the assembly hall. There were large papier-mache heads lined up on the window ledge and a row of brightly coloured costumes hanging from a clothes rail. Thorne guessed that most of the kids would be relishing their time off school, but that a few might be upset at missing out on performing in the school play.

  One kind of drama cancelled out by another.

  Donnelly asked Sue Pascoe to summarise her thoughts about Akhtar’s state of mind and, from that, to give her opinion about the degree of threat posed to the two hostages.

  ‘He’s certainly emotional,’ she said, looking down at her notes. ‘Angry at times… petulant even, but these kind of extreme emotions don’t last, certainly not once real tiredness kicks in. Other than that very first contact, there have been no threats of any sort against the hostages, no deadlines set. Javed hasn’t talked directly about suicide and there’s certainly no previous history of violence.’

  ‘You make Javed sound like the Archbishop of fucking Canterbury,’ Chivers said. He was smiling, but it didn’t look good on him. ‘Clearly we’re all worrying for nothing. Guns going off are neither here nor there and Weeks and that other poor sod are having a whale of a time in that shop.’

  ‘All right,’ Donnelly said. He looked back to Pascoe.

  ‘I don’t see any increase in threat or volatility,’ she said. ‘And unless and until that changes, I would definitely recommend that we keep doing what we are doing. This is all about wearing him down.’