Kid Alone

by Simon Mason

  The chief himself had given an update to the press, and a request had gone out to the public asking for anyone with relevant information to come forward immediately.

  “So give me progress,” Dowell said.

  Singh asked, “Do you need any assistance? Is there anything more I can do?”

  “No,” Collier said.

  Dowell moved on to review the investigation going on in Heeley, where interviews with Magee’s former associates and multiple gun dealers had so far yielded no results.

  Singh interrupted. “By the way, I’ve been wondering why Magee left Heeley to come here.”

  Dowell said, “I think that’s clear. The heat got too much for him down there. He’d pulled too many jobs, was too well-known. Obvious thing for him was to leave.”

  “Yes. But why come here?”

  Doug Williams said, “The city profile’s perfect for a type like Magee. Good opportunities.”

  “Correct,” Dowell said. “Standard career move for a guy like that.”

  Before Singh could respond there was a knock on the door and a young constable looked in. “Message for Inspector Singh,” she said. “Your twelve thirty appointment’s waiting.”

  Singh frowned. “I don’t have an appointment.”

  “Been waiting in the lobby, sir. Says it’s important. About the violin,” she added.

  Singh hesitated, then got to his feet, the embarrassed object of attention, and went across the office to the door.

  “Violin!” Dowell muttered as he passed.

  He went at speed down the stairs and along the corridor past Communications, Records, and the café area—and abruptly stopped. Retracing his steps, frowning, he walked back to the café and went with an incredulous expression between the tables to a chair in the corner, where Garvie Smith was sitting with his feet on a table sipping a coffee.

  “You’ve been ages,” Garvie said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just popped in to give you a hand. That’s the deal, isn’t it? It’s not because I feel sorry for you,” he added.

  “But how did you get into this area?”

  “Walked along the corridor same as you.”

  “How did you get through security?”

  “Well, I’d been waiting so long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Garvie gestured vaguely. “In the end they just sort of waved me through. Can’t stop, though. I’ve got an exam to get to. Can we make it quick? Do you mind?”

  There was a silence in which Singh seemed to be exerting an effort to control himself. “Come with me,” he said at last.

  Leading Garvie away from the café, he went briskly to the staircase, down to the interview rooms below, and along the corridor to a door badged INTERVIEW ROOM 2. He punched in a twelve-digit code and they went into a narrow room with a bank of screens along one wall, each showing a different angle of the same empty room.

  “That must be the interview room,” Garvie said, looking up at the screens.

  Singh nodded.

  “Get to it through that door?”

  There was a door at the end with a red light above it.

  Singh nodded again.

  “And this is, what, the monitoring room?”

  Singh ignored him. He said, “Look. Before we start, I don’t want you coming here again. Do you understand? Because I’m in the squad room now, there’s nowhere here I can meet you. It only makes things more difficult for me. Just now,” he added, “I was in a meeting.”

  Garvie shrugged. “Fine. Your call.” He paused. “Got a question for you about the Juwenalia parade.”

  Singh settled himself in his seat. “I told you. No sign of Magee.”

  “But you picked out Pyotor?”

  “Yes. He was easy to identify. At the edge of the parade the whole time, by himself. For four hours he doesn’t seem to even speak to anyone else.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “And no one speaks to him?”

  Singh shook his head. “He was a loner. He did things alone.”

  “He went to orchestra. He went to Juwenalia, even if he didn’t speak to anyone.”

  “He didn’t speak to anyone at orchestra, either, if he could help it. And I’ve checked the records for Juwenalia each year. This year was the only year Pyotor went: just to the parade, nothing else. His grandparents had encouraged him to go. Otherwise he would have stayed at home by himself, as usual.”

  “Can I see the Juwenalia records?”

  Singh produced printouts from his folder and Garvie scanned them.

  “Attendees for the last ten years,” Singh said.

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Pyotor’s name isn’t on any list except this year’s.”

  “Yeah, I see that too. I wasn’t looking for Pyotor’s name, though.”

  Singh frowned.

  Garvie said, “But I didn’t really come in for that. I wanted to talk about Pyotor’s weekly schedule.”

  “Good,” Singh said. “In fact, we’ve just made a discovery. Pyotor told his grandparents he was having extra math tutoring at school every Tuesday after orchestra practice—but the school knows nothing about it.”

  Garvie shrugged, and Singh looked at him in surprise.

  “It could be important.”

  “I wouldn’t bother if I were you.”

  “We are bothering very much. We know already that he was at school at that time, and it’s beginning to look like he met someone there. Nothing to do with math. Nothing to do with orchestra.”

  Garvie shrugged again.

  “We have extra manpower to speed up the process of viewing the CCTV and conducting the interviews, not just at the school, but in the area in general. A public request for information has gone out in the national media.”

  “I really wouldn’t bother.”

  “Why?”

  “It was me.”

  There was a pause then.

  Singh said quietly, “What?”

  “Me. I was giving him a bit of help with the math exam coming up. We used to meet Tuesdays up there on Top Pitch where it’s convenient to smoke. Sorry. End of. Let’s move on.”

  Singh was pale. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “You didn’t ask. What am I, psychic? Anyway, luckily for you, you’ve just made another breakthrough.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “You’re about to. Sadly, it’s come to light that interviews aren’t Detective Inspector Dowell’s strength.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It didn’t register with him when Mr. Merryweather told him orchestra practice after school was once a week.”

  Singh frowned. “Practice was every evening. Pyotor’s grandfather told me himself quite clearly.”

  “Only because that’s what Pyotor told him.”

  Singh hesitated again. “But if he wasn’t at practice … then where was he?” he said at last.

  “Jamal’s, as it happens.”

  “Jamal’s!” Singh’s face seemed to stop momentarily, and start up again. “What, every evening? How do you know this?”

  Garvie explained all that Sajid had told him, and Singh sat and listened, and when Garvie had finished he remained silent for several minutes.

  Then he said, “Okay. We missed it. We need to rethink.” He thought. “Why would Pyotor threaten to go to the police?”

  Garvie shrugged. “You know Khalid better than me. You must have been talking to him about the break-ins.”

  “Yes. He has made a great many complaints, as you can imagine.”

  “So what do you reckon?”

  “Let me think.” Singh thought. After a while he began to speak. “So … Khalid accuses Pyotor of stealing his phone.”

  “Correction. Khalid accused Pyotor of stealing things, including his phone.”

  “Okay, okay. Then the phone reappears, so perhaps Pyotor had just put it somewhere, tidied it, like Sajid sai
d.” He looked at Garvie questioningly.

  “Could be.”

  Singh pondered. “But was there something else Khalid thought Pyotor stole? That’s a question. Okay. Something maybe he couldn’t shout about. Something Khalid didn’t want anyone to know he had in the first place. Let me think about that. What did he tell you, about protection? He said he was getting protection, right? Meaning the dog.”

  “Not quite. First he said he’d got protection. Then he corrected himself, said he was getting it.”

  “Ah. Okay. So he had protection. Then he didn’t have it. This is before Genghis arrived.”

  Garvie nodded.

  “Last year,” Singh went on, “Khalid was cautioned for unlawful gun possession. It wasn’t the first time, and we didn’t think it would be the last. So let us say he had a gun. He had protection. And then he didn’t. That’s what you think, isn’t it? You think Pyotor stole Khalid’s gun. That’s why Khalid got Genghis.”

  “Where else would the kid get a gun? What does Uncle Len say?”

  “Preliminaries were incomplete. We haven’t had the full report yet.” Singh fell silent again. “But there’s another question. Pyotor might have stolen Khalid’s gun, but it was Pyotor who threatened to go to the police. Why?”

  “Pyotor was a watcher. He saw where Khalid kept his gun. Whatever Khalid was up to, he would have seen that too.”

  “So he saw something, something he didn’t like, something that frightened him, made him angry. He stole Khalid’s gun, he took it and went to the storage facility, where Jamal has a unit. What goes on at Jamal’s? What goes on in that unit?”

  Garvie shrugged again. “You’d have to ask Khalid. Only, if I were you, I’d go easy on him. He’s definitely the nervous type.”

  Singh nodded. “He has a temper also. We’ve had complaints about his treatment of his brother.”

  Garvie looked at his watch, cursed, and got to his feet. “Got to shoot. Got an exam. Don’t want to be late. What? What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “You know, Garvie, all this time you’ve never used his first name. It was always ‘Gimpel.’ Now it’s ‘Pyotor.’ And you were helping him with his schoolwork.”

  Garvie scowled as he got to his feet. “Doesn’t matter what I did. Doesn’t matter what he’s called, either. If I were you, I’d think less about what he was called and more about what he did.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  Without waiting for Singh, Garvie went out of the room and jogged down the corridor and up the stairs to the main drag on the ground floor, where he unexpectedly encountered Detective Inspector Dowell coming the other way.

  Dowell’s malevolent face went from passive to active.

  “Hello, son.”

  “Can’t stop,” Garvie said, moving around him.

  Dowell blocked him off. “Late for another funeral?” he said.

  “There’ll be a funeral if I don’t get moving.”

  Dowell nodded. He stopped a passing constable. “This boy says his name’s Smith.”

  “Sir.”

  “How many other Smiths his age do we have on record?”

  “Couldn’t say exactly, sir. A few hundred.”

  “Could get confusing. We need to sort this out. Escort him to my office.”

  “Sir.”

  The constable took hold of Garvie’s arm. Not in a friendly way.

  Garvie said, “Seriously, man, I’d love to chat, and I hear how good you are at it, but I’m late. Got a cabbie picking me up to take me to an exam.”

  Dowell nodded again. “Well, you’re going to be even later now, aren’t you?”

  At six o’clock the next morning twelve police officers wearing the black uniforms and helmets of the Counterterrorism Unit and wielding semiautomatic carbines kicked in the unresisting door of Jamal’s corner shop on Bulwarks Lane and charged inside, all identifying themselves as law-enforcement officials at the tops of their voices above the noise of cascading shelves and imploding refrigerators toppled in their wake. Joining other counterterrorist colleagues who had simultaneously forced entry at the back, they kicked down another (unlocked) door and rushed shouting up the narrow stairs to the tiny landing above, where they jammed together, thrashing about with their weapons, still bellowing instructions for calm and order.

  In the backseat of the chief constable’s car parked across the road, Detective Inspector Singh sat pale and grim, listening to the noise. Screams came from upstairs; there was a crash as something heavy fell over and a big pop of glass as a window exploded. A shot rang out, and a muscle in Singh’s cheek twitched.

  “Sir,” he began.

  The chief constable raised his hand. “We don’t take risks with suspects who may be armed,” he said.

  “No, sir.” Singh sat there imagining the headlines on the newspaper stacks outside Jamal’s the next day.

  Gradually the noise inside the building abated, the general uproar shrinking to the sound of a child crying and a shrill voice complaining about bandits, abruptly silenced.

  The chief added, without turning around, “This is your initiative, Detective Inspector. I’m only here to observe. I hope it yields results. This case has been short on results so far. I’ve asked Detective Inspector Dowell to let you handle the interview.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “It’s possible, of course, you may find the suspect uncooperative,” the chief added.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m expecting you to prevail.”

  A few moments later two policemen dragged a young man of South Asian descent out onto the sidewalk. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt fouled with blood, and he struggled raggedly against the men as they frogmarched him toward the emergency response unit. For a second, in the middle of his struggling, he looked across the street to where Singh waited, and their eyes met. Then the policemen got him under control and maneuvered him like an inconveniently sized box into the cage in the back of the van.

  Two hours later Khalid and Singh faced each other again, in Interview Room 1 in the basement of the police center in Cornwallis Way. Khalid was still dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. His face had changed, though. One eye had been replaced by an unnaturally smooth and glossy purple bump and the other had sunk into a watery red socket. One of his earlobes seemed to have come loose. His forehead had developed an unorthodox extension above his nose, and his bottom lip was inflated to twice its normal size.

  “Khalid,” Singh said quietly. “How are you feeling?”

  Khalid said nothing. It was not immediately clear that he was capable of speech.

  Location: Interview Room 1, Cornwallis Police Center: echoey, overbright.

  Interviewer: Detective Inspector Singh: tired, cautious.

  Interviewee: Khalid Baloch: pummeled, maddened.

  DI SINGH: You’ve been seen by the on-duty medical officer, I hope?

  KHALID BALOCH: [silent, glaring with one eye]

  DI SINGH: And you’ve exercised your right to contact your lawyer?

  KHALID BALOCH: [silent; glaring; blinking]

  DI SINGH: Okay. Listen. I’ve been asked to speak to you, Khalid, about issues relating to the murder of the schoolboy Pyotor Gimpel. I know this isn’t a good moment, I know you’re upset, but I urge you to cooperate, okay? It will make a material difference to the investigation. Do you understand?

  KHALID BALOCH: [silent, glaring, blinking, twitching]

  DI SINGH: We can take our time. Let me know if you need anything. Glass of water? Okay, then. The first question I want to ask you concerns—

  KHALID BALOCH: Take our time? Material difference? What about Got your head kicked in by a bunch of robots? What about Bust up your shop?

  DI SINGH: Khalid, I—

  KHALID BALOCH: What is it? Is it ’cause I’m getting burglared all the time it’s all right for the coppers to join in, beat me up as well?

  DI SINGH: Khalid, please—

  KHALID BALOCH: I got my pie s
afe all smashed, yeah? I got my big Williams fridge done over, right? The multideck, man, nearly new off of eBay! What about all the shelving? What about all the stock? What about the door? Put a couple of hundred into new locks last week—now I got no door left! What I got is damages I can’t pay for, right? What I got is full refurb, yeah? Six o’clock in the morning, man, I hadn’t even brushed my teeth! Now I’m not even sure I still got all my teeth.

  DI SINGH: Khalid, please, let me—

  KHALID BALOCH: Think I got insurance? You think I’m that dopey?

  DI SINGH: I’ll make sure you get legal advice, okay? To help you make the appropriate claim. Do you understand? To help you decide if you want to make a formal complaint.

  KHALID BALOCH: Formal complaint! I know what your formal complaints is.

  DI SINGH: But there are some important questions I have to ask you first. So, now, please. Thank you. As you know, Pyotor Gimpel was murdered on the night of Friday, June eighth. I want you to tell me what you know about it.

  KHALID BALOCH: You having a laugh? Is that it? Comedy capers, is that what this is?

  DI SINGH: Where were you during that night?

  KHALID BALOCH: Nowhere, man.

  DI SINGH: You were at home? Who can corroborate that? Your father? Sajid?

  KHALID BALOCH: You’re not listening, man. This murder, yeah? I don’t know nothing about it, right?

  DI SINGH: Tell me about Pyotor, then. We know he spent a lot of time at your shop, in the evenings, with Sajid. And that you had an argument with him. You accused him of stealing.

  [Silence]

  DI SINGH: We know all this, Khalid, so you might as well be straight with me. I want you tell me about Pyotor.

  KHALID BALOCH: This is all bullshit, man. You don’t know what he was like.

  DI SINGH: What was he like?

  KHALID BALOCH: No sense of whose is whose is what. He’d just take stuff, know what I mean?

  DI SINGH: What did he take?

  KHALID BALOCH: My phone, is one thing.

  DI SINGH: He stole your phone?

  KHALID BALOCH: I got it back, right? But only after I told him.

  DI SINGH: Did he take anything else?

  KHALID BALOCH: He was just weird like that, is all I’m saying.

  DI SINGH: Khalid, did he take a gun from you?