by Alan Porter
‘They’ll be custom made or adapted from hydra-shoks.’
‘Terrorists don’t make their own bullets.’
‘No they don’t,’ Leila said. ‘Keep that in mind. Do we have identities?’
‘Getting there. We’ve collected all the physical evidence, we’re now beginning to trawl through what’s left. Why’s CTC involved?’
‘They’re not. You’ve just got me.’
‘OK, then why are you involved?’
‘Execution-style shootings are rare. Executions of three women are unheard of. This wasn’t a random shooting, so I’m working on the theory that it could be related to this morning’s events. Unless you have anything else?’
‘Crazy boyfriend?’
‘Are you seriously pursuing that as an option?’
‘Right now we’re open to anything.’
‘Then you need to focus. There were two attackers. The boot-print on the front door is different from the bloody print on the stairs. There were exactly nine shots used in the executions.’
‘Witnesses say there was a single gunshot, followed some minutes later by a sustained round of gunfire.’
Leila walked to the window and looked out. It was single glazed and looked out directly onto Vallance Road. Plenty of people would have heard the shots. Plenty had probably seen the gunmen.
‘Right, so… two men – not more, it would have been inefficient – broke in on the ground floor,’ she said, turning back to Davis. ‘They mounted the stairs to a flat they knew, or knew of. They shoulder this door and enter the hallway. A single shot gets the women’s attention. You need to establish whether that was a warning tenth shot or whether one of the victims was hit straight away. There’ll be a bullet in the wall somewhere if it was a warning.
‘There’s a pause. That suggests this was not a straight-forward execution. The gunmen wanted information…
‘They then execute the three women. Both men fired. There was no time for a gun to be reloaded, and while it is possible that an extended clip might have been used, I think we can rule it out.’
‘Are you guessing, or do you know?’ Davis said with a faint smile.
‘A hit like this would have seen both men armed. You’ve told me already that the bullets were 9mm hollowpoint. These people knew what they were doing, so they’re not going to risk a jam, which for quick-fire is a high probability with HP ammunition.’
A uniformed officer ran up the stairs behind them.
‘Martin Thomas has given us names,’ he said as he entered the flat’s sitting room. ‘Said there were two women on the lease, but he knew there were three living here most of the time, and a fourth who came and went.’ He handed Inspector Davis a sheet of paper.
‘Kalela and Nagham Chalabi, sisters,’ Davis said. ‘Probably two of the deceased.’
‘He doesn’t know the names of either of the other two,’ the messenger said. ‘Or claims he doesn’t. They may have been illegals. The top flat was occupied by a single male, student by the name of Faran Jaafar. Thomas thought he heard him knock on the women’s door before he went out around nine-thirty.’
‘Do we know where Jaafar is now? Leila said.
‘Not yet. Top flat’s locked and there’s no reply. He’s not known to the police. We’re trawling records, but if he’d been on the radar, we’d have found him by now. Immigration might get something.’ His radio crackled and he excused himself.
‘You still think you’re needed here?’ Davis said.
‘Where are the bodies?’ Leila said.
‘Tagged and bagged in the bedroom. We’re stretched thin with the riots, so transport’ll come when they can.’
‘I’ll make a call, get them moved. We need confirmed identities as soon as we can.’
‘What are you not telling me?’ Davis said. ‘You think these people were part of the group behind this morning’s bomb?’
‘When we know who they are, then I can tell you. I’m going upstairs. Alone, please. Give me five minutes.’
She mounted the stairs to the top floor. So far Jaafar’s flat had not been opened by the police, and that was how she liked it. She could view this one fresh.
She crouched and felt around the black plastic bin-bag outside the door. It contained the usual kitchen detritus, but what interested Leila most were the cans. She tore a small hole in the bag and saw the distinctive red and gold logo of Stella lager. There were at least ten cans in the bag.
So that ruled out the first likely place Mr Jaafar might have been tonight. He had not got locked down in the mosque.
She had left her lock picks in the car, so she shouldered the door open instead. The wood was old and riddled with rot, and it might as well have been left open anyway.
Inside, a short corridor with one room off to each side led to a sitting room at the front of the building. A lamp was on, casting a soft yellowy glow up the hallway.
Even in the low light she could tell this was a flat occupied by a single male. The carpet was dirty, and there was a pervasive smell of beer, old pizza, a bathroom that had never seen bleach, and that underlying odour of maleness.
It was not, however, the flat of a pauper.
Against the wall was a bicycle, a Scott Addict carbon fibre thing that must have cost three grand. The back tyre was flat.
The door on the left opened onto a bathroom. For now, she did not flick the light switch on. Opposite it, under the eaves of the roof was a bedroom. Again, a lamp was burning on the bedside table. The furniture was old and scratched – probably supplied at minimum cost by the landlord, Mr Thomas – but scattered around the room were top-end clothes. Nothing too flashy, just quality: Hilfiger sweatshirts, Armani jeans, Nike trainers on the floor. She backed out of the room.
‘Oh, sorry Ma’am, I didn’t know you were up here,’ a voice said from the open door behind her. She turned to the silhouetted constable.
‘Give me a minute, will you? Unless you’ve found Mr Jaafar?’
‘No, Ma’am. I’ll let you know when we do.’
The constable left and Leila tried to get back inside the head of the flat’s occupant.
The name was middle eastern, possibly, she thought, Kuwaiti. The wealth suggested it. Yet he wasn’t working in England; there were no suits, and this was not an address to give a prospective employer. Student, slumming it a bit maybe – the pseudo-intellectual left-wing variety rather than the Islamo-fascist kind.
Kuwaiti meant Muslim, three to one a Sunni, but this guy was not devout. He might drag himself to Friday prayers if there was nothing else to do, but he preferred a beer. If they were thinking Islamist extremists for the bombing this morning, this man was nothing to do with it. She doubted he’d give a shit if someone made a crack about his beliefs any more than if they spilled beer on his three hundred pound jeans. He lived in that buzzy, youthful zone where everything was disposable.
In the sitting room was a single armchair, a coffee table, TV, dining table with two mis-matched chairs and a sideboard. Again, all supplied by the landlord. The right side of the room had been partitioned off to form a basic kitchen. In the light of the single lamp on the table it looked as if it saw very little use. There were a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal in the corner, a bowl and a plate on the drainer. The cooker was clean and there was no sign of pans or cooking utensils. He was eating somewhere else. University canteen? Take-away? Downstairs with his neighbours?
On the table, a laptop stood with its lid open, the screen blank. Beside it was a Canon G30 digital video camera and a GoPro mini camera. Two external hard disks were almost buried by papers, and a stack of political and cultural textbooks were piled against the wall. The iPhone – for there most certainly was an iPhone in this guy’s arsenal – was missing.
Still wearing the latex gloves she had put on downstairs, she tapped the laptop’s keyboard. The screen instantly came to life (latest version of the OS – the older versions never woke up this quickly). There was no password, so he hadn’t intende
d to leave the machine unattended for long.
Scattered across a virtual desktop as untidy as his real one were files: pdfs of research articles he had downloaded, a couple of game shortcuts, and a few videos with numbers rather than file names. There were eight or nine folders labelled as containing more video files. She double-clicked on the hard disk icon and the main disk was displayed. She opened the icon on the right labelled Movies, and was not surprised to see dozens of folders, mostly labelled only with dates. She closed the disk window. Forensic techs could wade through this lot if it turned out Jaafar was worth investigating.
Her logical mind had already dismissed the owner of all this Western capitalist detritus, but her gut had not. He was nothing to do with the bombing, but he was something to do with the women downstairs – if nothing else, he’d checked on them before he went out this evening – and something had been important enough about them that they had been subject to a professional hit.
She opened a video at random from the desktop. It was small, probably taken at low resolution on his phone, not one of the cameras. It was a static shot taken inside a lecture theatre, showing more of the head of the girl in front of him than the lecturer. She scanned through the file, but it was just more of the same.
She tried another. This time it was an action movie, full screen, the camera just inches from the road surface as it sped along London streets. She had no doubt that if she went back to the bike in the hall she’d find a mount for the little GoPro.
The third file was taken in a park. The camera was hand-held, initially unsteady, pointing at a Jungle Gym in the middle distance. After a few seconds the image zoomed in on two little boys playing on the ropes. It held steady for a few seconds as one hung upside down, revealing his skinny white torso.
There had to be something, Leila thought.
But she was wrong.
Into the frame walked two women. Jaafar must have waved to them. They began to walk towards him, one slightly in front of the other.
Both were dressed modestly, in a style that suggested the influence of the middle east rather than a slavish adherence to principle. The front one – clearly a friend of Jaafar’s – spoke to him. Leila did not turn the sound up. She could form a much more accurate first impression of the relationship between them by watching them rather than listening.
Both women were in their late thirties, early forties. The more reluctant of the two carried a plastic carrier bag with green vegetables poking out of the top. Both carried small handbags. They were not fellow students and were probably not old enough to be his mother and aunt. Jaafar said something and both women laughed. They were comfortable with him, at ease. The first was happy to maintain eye contact during their brief talk, and smiled freely. They knew him well, met him often, always in informal surroundings. There was none of the awkwardness that might suggest this meeting was out of the usual context.
There was a very good chance that these were Jaafar’s neighbours from downstairs.
The first woman knelt down in front of Jaafar and may have made some comment about the camera. For a moment it turned away. When it turned back, it had been placed on the ground and the image was no longer that of an experienced cinematographer. He was just keeping the camera rolling because that was his habit. The woman’s knees, tight together beneath a thin skirt, filled the lower right corner of the shot. Her friend also knelt down, a little further back, on the left.
Leila was about to turn the video off and go back downstairs to ask Davis to make an identity match with the bodies in the bedroom when something caught her eye. Quickly she hit pause and peered at the screen.
The second woman had moved her hands to her knees – a movement not of comfort but defence. She was nervous, of the cameraman or of his camera she could not tell. But it was what else that gesture revealed that made Leila’s heart beat a little faster.
On the middle finger of her right hand was a ring, crudely fashioned out of a key.
They’d got their bomber on film, and this time they’d got her face.
15
Keith Jordan parked his car some way from Martlesham on the edge of Broadwater Farm. He refilled the 7-shot magazine of his stubby Kimber pistol and walked quickly along the road to his target’s building. He had been hired to do just the one job tonight, but things change. The message had come through on his disposable cell a little after eleven o’clock. Just an address and a simple instruction. One more job and another fifty thousand wired into his account in St Kitts. By the time it had been laundered out it would only be half that, but twenty five grand for a hit on some trash family in the Farm was unbelievably good money. Whoever his ultimate paymasters were, they obviously didn’t care about driving a hard bargain.
He had taken James French with him to the Vallance Road job, but out here two white guys walking into the middle of a black man’s ghetto might be remembered. Anyway, this should be an easy job. Get in, collect the goods, eliminate witnesses, get out.
He jogged up the concrete steps to the top floor. It was almost midnight. Thunder rumbled and the air was thick and charged. A couple of kids hung over the balcony walkway watching fireworks lighting the sky beyond the next block, but there was surprisingly little trouble here – they didn’t party like it was 1985 in the Farm any more. One of the kids looked at him as he passed. He didn’t care. The best description the police would be able to get would be big white dude. One white dude looks pretty much like any other when you’re eight years old and black.
The target flat was at the far end.
He knocked on the door and listened. Footsteps inside. Too quick to have got out of bed. Whoever was in there was already awake. That could mean there was a whole bunch of them sitting around smoking ganja and talking bollocks. He slipped his hand into the back of his jacket and wrapped his fist around the pistol’s grip.
The moment the door opened, he shouldered it, hard. There was a startled cry as he pushed on through, kicking the door closed behind him. He grabbed the short wire-haired woman by the throat and drove her back towards the living room.
‘How many?’ his whispered.
‘Wha…?’
‘How many of you here?’
‘Just me. And my daughter.’ She was telling the truth: the sitting room was empty. ‘Oh, please, Mr, you got the wrong people.’
He took the pistol out and shoved the woman backwards. She tripped, but the first bullet slammed into her chest long before she hit the floor. He stood over her for a moment. Stupid bitch. Should have brought your kid up to keep out of other people’s business. Teach a bit of respect. He put a second bullet in her forehead.
There was a photograph of the woman on the wall beside him. With the gun still in his hand he tore it off its hook and peered at it. On the woman’s left was a girl, fourteen maybe, thin, with her hair all straightened and highlighted like a Beyoncé mini-me. On her right was a bigger kid, or possibly – they say black don’t crack, after all – her husband. Big face, big dumb grin, but keen eyes. He smashed the frame and stuffed the picture into his jacket pocket.
Someone screamed just behind him. A girl in baggy pyjamas, long straight hair, headphones around her neck, stood in the doorway blinking hard in the light. For a moment she just stared at him then turned and ran for the front door. In an instant Jordan was on her. He wrapped her hair around his free fist and dragged her towards the living room.
‘Where’s the computer?’ he said. She tried to shake her head and pointed at the passageway leading to the bedrooms.
As he passed, Jordan kicked open the bathroom door, then the door to the first bedroom. Both were empty and dark. His third kick revealed the room he was looking for. Three computer monitors stood on a desk, their screens alive with rolling text. A single low energy bulb burned in a lamp, angled down on the keyboard. He shoved the girl against the desk.
‘This all of it?’
‘What?’
‘This what you’ve been working on?’
‘It’s not…’ she said. Her voice was tight with terror. He pushed her to the wall and smashed one of the monitors with the butt of the gun.
‘Talk to me and you might live,’ he said. ‘I’m only interested in files that were put on here in the last twenty four hours.’
‘I don’t know what he’s got. He was working on the print out.’
‘He?’
‘My brother. This is his…’
‘Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know. He went…’
He raised the gun and shot her down through the right shoulder. The bullet was a custom low-velocity hollow-point, designed to be slow and extremely disruptive. The girl doubled over, clutching at her chest. Blood began to seep from her mouth. The wound would be fatal in ten minutes or so, but he could work on her until it was.
‘He went where? Next door? The city? Fucking Africa?’
She coughed a glob of blood onto the carpet. Lightning illuminated the room and the girl flinched when a sharp crack of thunder rattled the windows.
‘When’s he coming back?’ Jordan said. ‘Talk to me.’
The girl was getting unsteady on her feet. He lifted her head with the barrel of the pistol and looked into her eyes. There wasn’t much left in them.
‘Shit. You’re not going to die on me, are you?’ He’d nicked something important with that bullet. Something that was going to take her out in a lot less than ten minutes anyway.
The girl coughed and more blood poured down her chin. A volley of firecrackers exploded close to the building and he could hear people shouting.
The girl retched and coughed again. Jordan stepped backwards, narrowly avoiding being sprayed. She gasped for breath and looked up at him with pleading, wide eyes.
‘I can make this stop if you tell me where he is,’ he said.
Her eyes grew even wider and her chest hitched as she tried to draw more air into her lungs. Her left hand waved in the direction of the window.
‘I know he’s fucking out. Where?’
Her hand dropped and she took a half-step towards him.
