The Binford Mysteries: A Collection of Gritty Urban Mystery Novels (3 - BOOK BOX SET)

by Rashad Salim

  “What did you see?”

  I told her. She had a few other questions and I answered them.

  Pete was busy jotting down everything Omar and I had said from the moment he and Laura first approached us.

  “Did you see anything else?” Laura asked.

  I felt Omar’s eyes burning a hole into me.

  “Yeah,” I said and told her all about the van and how I didn’t think it was necessarily part of this but she took all of it in like it was the most interesting thing she’d ever heard.

  “When you print this, will it make a difference?” Omar asked Laura.

  “How do you mean?” she asked him.

  “Will it help solve the murder?” Omar asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  Laura and Pete looked at me. I locked eyes with Laura.

  “Look, no offence but I know how you tabloids work.”

  “We’re not a tabloid,” Pete said.

  “Same thing,” I said. “You just want to get a front page story. That’s all.”

  “So you think this is front page news?” Laura asked. There was a smile too.

  “I don’t know. All I know is that boy’s family’s gonna see that article. Bare that in mind.” I thought I sounded really sensible and surprised myself.

  “Don’t worry,” Laura said. “The dignity of murder victims is always a priority for the paper. We won’t print anything that’ll make it worse for anyone involved.”

  4

  Asim

  The next day, it was on the news.

  The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News (although I didn’t see that myself because we didn’t have cable. Just the basic four terrestrial channels – BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4).

  The news networks were very brief in their reports about the body. It was the same with the newspapers but I was told it was because the Sunday papers didn’t have much time to print the story with more details.

  I was watching the six o’ clock news when my older brother Rizwan walked into the living room.

  “Still waitin’ for your fifteen seconds of fame?” he asked and slumped down on the sofa beside me. He had just finished lifting weights and stank of sweat.

  “Not really, besides, I didn’t get interviewed by any news crews.”

  “Too bad.”

  He had missed the entire situation with the corpse because he had been out with his bum chum Salman.

  Rizwan was twenty, four years older than me, and worked as a delivery man for a local cash and carry convenient store on Binford Lane. He was my only sibling and I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have any other older brothers like him. He was okay sometimes but most of the time he was a pain in the arse and I couldn’t wait for him to move out and get married.

  The phone rang and Rizwan answered it.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Who is it?” I thought it might have been Max. I hadn’t spoken to him since school on Friday.

  “Your annoying fat mate.”

  I told him I’d take the call from the phone in my parents’ room upstairs. I went up there and picked up the phone and waited for Rizwan to hang up downstairs before I started talking. I had to be careful. I had caught Rizwan listening in too many times in the past to let him get away with that during this call which I assumed was going to be very personal.

  “What’s up, Billy?”

  “Nothin’ much. You talk to Max?”

  “No, why?”

  “I was just wonderin’ if you spoke to him about the body, that’s all.”

  I probably would have if he had been in touch. I had phoned him earlier but his mum said he wasn’t home.

  “You been watchin’ the news?” Omar asked.

  I told him I had.

  “What about the papers?”

  I told him I hadn’t but had flicked through a few at the local WH Smith branch.

  “Did you check the Today?”

  “Nah, why?” I said and remembered it was the newspaper Laura and Pete were from.

  “They printed one of the longest articles out of all the papers. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “They mentioned us!”

  I took a deep breath. “As in?”

  “They printed their interview with us. That lady, Laura, she got our names in the paper, man!”

  He couldn’t contain his excitement as my mind raced trying to recall everything I had said to her.

  “They printed our names?”

  “Yes! We’re famous!”

  Anger built up inside me like a volcano and like a volcano I felt I was about to erupt.

  “That fuckin’ bitch!”

  He was silent for a moment. “...What’s wrong, man?”

  Omar was so stupid sometimes I often wondered how he could be that way. That stupidity was actually something I had often been grateful for during the many years we had been friends. He was such a simple sod that I could count on him to not put one over me – at least without me finding out right away – but at other times he could be a liability.

  “Calm down, man.”

  I tried.

  “Anyway, what’s the harm?” When I didn’t answer, he continued. “If you don’t like it they mentioned our names, I’m sure they’ll apologise if we complain to them.”

  It was too late. The damage had been done. No apology would fix it.

  The more I thought about how nothing could be done about it now, the more I calmed down until finally I felt all the anger released.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “It’ll probably blow over in a few days anyway.”

  “Yeah, the cops will have cracked the case by then. Especially if someone who read the paper and knows somethin’ about the white van calls the hotline.”

  I had been nodding along to his comments until his comment about the white van jolted me.

  “What the fuck?”

  “What?” His ignorance was unbelievable.

  “They mentioned the white van?”

  “Yeah, they wrote about how you saw the van after you found the corpse.”

  “Aw, fuck...”

  “What you worried about now?”

  “They mentioned our names and they mentioned the van, you idiot.”

  I waited for it to sink in for him. I let him think about it for as long as he needed. In the couple of seconds he thought about it I had panicked thoughts race through my mind.

  “...And what? You think the geezer in the van will read that and know who told everyone?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, what if he had nothin’ to do with what happened? What if, like you say, it was just a coincidence and someone had to drive by eventually? Someone innocent?”

  He had a point but it made me think of something else which brought me back to my initial concern.

  “Right. So either way I’m fucked.”

  “How?”

  “Either an innocent van driver might be pissed at me for bringin’ the wrong attention to him...”

  “Or?”

  “...Or the man who dumped that dead boy, after killing him, will come after me for grassin’ him up!”

  5

  DC Cole

  It didn’t take long to identify the corpse. We managed to keep the victim’s name out of the papers for as long as we could.

  A sixteen year old local boy by the name of Rishi Malhotra was reported missing less than a week earlier. DI Richardson had Rishi’s uncle come down to the mortuary and identify him. He confirmed it was Rishi and that was that. His family had their answer to where he had ended up but their nightmare was just getting started now.

  I was in the tiny office I shared with DI Richardson when he walked in and sat down at his desk opposite me. It was Sunday evening, almost 24 hours since Rishi had been discovered.

  “Booth’s doing the post-mortem now but I had a word with him and he told me a few things he learnt during the preliminary examination.”

  “And?”

&nbs
p; “...The boy was sexually assaulted.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t surprised but the disgust still got to me.

  “Of course, we won’t get any of the DNA info ‘til much later.”

  He leaned back in his seat and seemed lost in thought.

  “What now?” I had been part of a few murder investigations in the past but this was the first one at my new post and I wanted to see how things were done here.

  “I’m gonna gather all the case files and brief the whole team first thing tomorrow mornin’.”

  I liked the way he said ‘whole team’. It made me think we had a lot of manpower instead of the five person crew we were.

  6

  Asim

  I had been dreading Monday, the first day back to school since I discovered the dead boy on the weekend. I thought about faking sickness but knew I couldn’t pull it off.

  I had lain in bed the night before worrying about how the newspapers had printed my name and how everyone – including the killer – knew my name. I had punished myself for ever mentioning the white van and driver. I had put myself in danger.

  Then again, as far as people finding out I had been the one to discover the body, the newspapers couldn’t have made much of a difference – gossip would’ve done that job far more than the press could.

  When I left the house in the morning, I met up with Omar halfway on the walk to school.

  He was standing at the street corner where we always met and held a broadsheet newspaper. I felt like snatching the newspaper out of his hand and throwing it away before he could say anything but let it go.

  We greeted each other and he fell into step with me.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you read one of those before. Is this your new hobby?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re not even a bit curious about any of this,” Omar said.

  He was right about that. But I knew I wouldn’t like what I’d find in the papers and didn’t see how it would make any difference if I learnt anything more about the body.

  “Just listen to this,” he said and opened the newspaper. He started reading parts of the news article, which I noticed was a lot longer than I expected and on one of the first few pages.

  Omar told me the boy’s name and how he had been sexually assaulted. There was a quote in there from Omar, which he was pleased about but disappointed that the paper hadn’t printed either his or my name. That was something of a relief for me.

  “You chatted to Max since last Friday?” I asked.

  “Nah. You?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what his fuckin’ problem is.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Omar said. “He’s just being a drama queen.”

  “Over what?”

  Max and I were best friends but lately we had spent less and less time together. The three of us – Omar, Max and I – used to spend nearly every Saturday hanging out around town together. That’s how we spent the previous few years but for some reason Max had become more distant during the last few months and I had no idea why.

  “Has he said anything to you about me?” I asked.

  Omar was silent. I had a feeling he was hiding something.

  I grabbed him in a headlock and squeezed one of his fat pecs. “Has he? Don’t fuckin’ lie to me!”

  “He hasn’t! I swear!”

  I believed him and let him go.

  “I’d have told you if he did anyway.”

  I knew that much was true. This fat fucker couldn’t keep anything a secret.

  When we got to school, we went straight to our form room but from the minute I set foot indoors I felt like everyone was watching us. And me in particular.

  We walked down the long corridor towards our form room and passed a few other classes in our school year. I could sense a lot of people talking about me. From the corner of my eye I could see various crowds of girls huddled together and pointing at us. I could feel their eyes on me and starting getting hot under the collar.

  “They’re talkin’ about us, right?” I whispered.

  “Maybe your flies are undone,” Omar whispered back.

  We reached our home room and half our class was already there waiting outside. I couldn’t wait for our form teacher, Mrs Taylor, to show up so we could enter and get through registration.

  Omar and I greeted a few of our friends and were making the usual small talk – what we got up to on the weekend, what films we had watched, what homework due that day we hadn’t done – when I got the feeling they were all expecting something from me. It was obvious what it was – it couldn’t be anything else – but I was adamant on downplaying it.

  Then I heard Ravinder call out down the hallway. “So the hero is here?”

  I looked at him and swore in my mind.

  He was stood with a few of his cronies and had a smug smile on his face.

  Ravinder was one of the more popular boys in class and like most popular boys at school he was an obnoxious pain in the arse and I couldn’t wait to never see him again.

  That wouldn’t have been too long I thought. We were in the last few weeks of the academic year for Year 11 students. Once study leave began for the GCSE exams, we’d only see each other at the exams and then that was it – we’d all go our separate ways.

  Ravinder walked up to me. “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t get a good look at his face.”

  “Were his guts all over the place?”

  His crassness didn’t surprise me. He had always been this way and even in regards to a murder victim he didn’t hold back. I knew he was a massive horror movie buff and loved violent action movies. His favourite actor was Arnold Schwarzenegger and not a day went by where he didn’t do poor imitations and quote Arnie’s famous one liners.

  “Show some respect.”

  I turned to my side to see one of my classmates, Shazia, standing there with a few of her girlfriends.

  “Whatever.” Ravinder rolled his eyes and turned his back to us.

  I looked at Shazia but said nothing. She held my eyes for a moment and neither of us spoke.

  I had been in love with Shazia for years. She was about 5’5, with brown eyes and a brunette. She had a pointy nose I always found cute and the clearest skin ever.

  I was in love with her and I wasn’t the only one. She was the prettiest girl in class and plenty of other boys in our school year had their eye on her but from what I knew, she had always been single.

  Just like me. That was something I had been working on for too long.

  “Were you scared?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer that. We had barely spoken to each other all year. I knew she knew how I felt about her but to her credit she didn’t make it worse for me like a lot of other girls did for the boys who were mad about them.

  “I didn’t really think about it.”

  She looked at me for a moment and smiled. “That was really brave of you to dive into the canal.”

  I thought about clarifying how shallow the canal was and that bravery never came into it but I choked on the words and nothing came out.

  When I finally composed myself I looked at her and said, “I was just there.”

  She laughed at that and I felt stupid. I was just there? I couldn’t help but smile back at her.

  I felt Omar tugging my jacket from behind but couldn’t take my eyes off Shazia.

  “Well, tell me about it later.” She smiled and walked away.

  I couldn’t believe it. She wanted to talk to me again! I don’t think a girl I was into had ever said something like that before and it made me feel high.

  “Asim.” Omar tugged me again. “Max is here.”

  I spun around.

  Max was right in front of me. “What’s happening, guys?”

  He sounded so casual as if there was no awkwardness between us. As if he hadn’t heard about the dead body at all.

  “Where you been hidin’?” I asked him.
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br />   “What d’you mean?”

  I told him how Omar and I had been trying to reach him all day the day before. He apologised for that and told us how he had been busy, making it sound like we should be more understanding. That pissed me off more because he knew it wasn’t like that.

  He had been avoiding us and there was no doubt about that.

  “You know about Saturday?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. That was some fucked up shit, eh?”

  “You missed out on that, bro!” Omar said to him.

  “Thank god,” he said and that was the first time it occurred to me that it might have been a good thing he hadn’t been with us. He looked more disturbed by the incident than me and Omar but I wasn’t going to go easy on him. I was still pissed off for him being distant for the last few weeks.

  “How come you don’t like hangin’ around with us no more?” I asked Max.

  Omar looked at me stunned. I had come out with it. There was no beating around the bush anymore.

  Max smirked. “It ain’t like that.”

  But it was and his denial was only making me angrier.

  “...When was the last time you went out with us?”

  “I’ve been busy with my dad and all that DIY shit. You know that.” His expression changed. He was more serious now. “Besides, it’s not as if I’m missing out on a lot, is it?”

  “You call finding a dead body not a lot?”

  I knew I had taken it too far but it was too late.

  “So fucking what!”

  I said nothing.

  “You gotta admit though,” Omar said to Max. “The three of us haven’t gone to the cinema in a long time, have we?” When Max didn’t answer, Omar added “And not just the cinema.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t make time for you lot on the weekend,” Max said, looking at me. “And I’m sorry if I’m not spending all my free time doing the same shit we’ve been doing since Omar hit puberty but there’s more to life than just fucking around town, you know.”

  I knew he had a valid point. It was also a mature one but not one I could see coming from Max. It didn’t seem honest enough.