‘Amin was taken to the local A amp;E to get stitched up, then brought back here the same evening. It’s all in the police report.’
‘I haven’t seen it yet,’ Thorne said. He had already decided that the constraints placed upon him by time might be no bad thing in terms of his investigation. Not having had a chance to look at the notes, he would be unprejudiced by the findings of the original inquiry and would have no choice but to investigate Amin Akhtar’s death as if it had just happened. If he came to the same conclusions as Martin Dawes then so be it, but this way he might just be giving himself the best chance of getting at the truth and that was what Javed Akhtar wanted. ‘Best to start with a clean slate anyway, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Compare what I find out today with what my predecessor found out eight weeks ago.’
Bracewell smiled, knowing. ‘See if anyone changes their story.’
Thorne smiled back. ‘That’s always a possibility.’ He kept his eyes on the governor as he drank the last of his coffee. ‘Any idea who was responsible for the attack on Amin?’
‘A couple of my officers reckon they’ve got a very good idea,’ Bracewell said. ‘But proving it is something else entirely. The boy concerned denied it of course. Amin refused to tell us who it was and it’s very hard to find witnesses in a place like this. I’m sure you know what it’s like.’
‘I’ll need to speak to him,’ Thorne said. ‘Proof or no proof.’
‘Unfortunately, he was released a couple of months ago. Just a few days after the attack on Amin, in fact. Annoying, but without evidence there was nothing we could do to prevent it.’
‘I’ll need a name, then. The address on his release papers.’
Bracewell said that shouldn’t be a problem, but with sufficient hesitation for Thorne to point out that, as far as this inquiry was concerned, the normal procedures did not, could not apply. There was simply no time for niceties, or ethics. Bracewell said he understood, and though Thorne could see that he did not, that the man was still desperate to know the reason for what was happening, he could also see that the situation was making him uneasy.
‘I need to speak to whoever found the body as well.’
‘That was Ian McCarthy,’ Bracewell said. ‘ Dr McCarthy. I think he should be in by now, so I can get one of my officers to take you down there. If that’s OK?’
Thorne thanked him for his help and Bracewell phoned out to make the arrangements. Almost as soon as he had hung up, the phone rang and Bracewell took the call. He said, ‘For Pete’s sake,’ and ‘Right,’ and when the call was finished, he sat back shaking his head as though the weight of the world had just settled on his smartly suited shoulders. ‘One of the boys has smashed his cell up. Seventeen-year-old Polish lad, doesn’t speak a word of bloody English.’
‘Can’t be easy.’
‘It isn’t. My officers are doing their best, but they’ve got their work cut out as it is.’
‘I meant for the boy.’
Thorne remembered the colourful sign he had seen at the entrance to the prison. A single word written in dozens of languages. It was a nice idea, but a shame that the effort at translation had not gone a little further. The inmates probably thought it was a sick joke anyway, considering where they were and what that one word was.
Welcome.
‘Well no,’ Bracewell stammered. ‘Of course not… I mean, obviously . It’s a very tricky situation for everyone.’
When the prison officer arrived, Thorne stood to gather up the files and Bracewell moved quickly from behind his desk to assure him that he would remain available if there was anything else he could help with. With his hand pressed firmly between the governor’s two, Thorne said that he would bear the offer in mind.
Then he turned and followed his escort out of the office.
Decided, on reflection, that perhaps there was a miniature portrait of the Queen tucked away in one of the drawers.
In the school’s assembly hall, the temporary Incident Room was up and running. A communications team had set up fax and phone lines and had tapped into a local CCTV feed. Monitors showed live, black and white images of the shopfront from two different angles, while a hastily erected camera in the alleyway behind the property broadcast a picture of the shop’s back door. There was no sound and precious little movement. Occasionally an emergency vehicle moved through shot, or a stray dog that nobody had yet been able to catch. A member of the CO19 team wandered between the two Armed Response Vehicles which were still parked on the street across from the newsagent’s.
Still waiting for instructions.
There were more than two dozen officers working inside the school. Most sat at computers, feeding back any information they could find about the layout of the shop and the man who owned it to the team from Specialist Crime. A few more had come down from Helen Weeks’ unit in Streatham, volunteering to help, but now found themselves with little to do.
Donnelly was at the monitors with Sue Pascoe when Chivers walked across to join them.
They studied the pictures for a while.
‘Phones?’ Chivers said.
Pascoe shook her head. ‘He’s making us wait.’
They had quickly established that there was a landline in the shop, but just as quickly discovered that Akhtar had taken the phone off the hook. Calls being made every fifteen minutes to the mobiles registered to both Helen Weeks and Stephen Mitchell were going straight to voicemail.
‘In for the long haul, I reckon,’ Donnelly said.
Chivers shrugged. ‘Up to you.’
‘Up to Mr Akhtar, I would have thought.’
‘Only if we let him have control of the situation.’
Donnelly stared at the screen. ‘I’m open to suggestions.’
‘Look at those shutters.’ Chivers pointed at the monitor. ‘They’ve already been twisted up at the bottom, see? That’s just kids or what have you. Wouldn’t take us long to get through those.’
‘Long enough for him to do something.’
‘We need to get this sorted quickly,’ Chivers said.
‘What we need,’ Pascoe said, ‘is to open a channel of communication with our hostage taker.’
‘At least let us get Tech Support in here.’ Chivers was looking at Donnelly. ‘Get some microphones up on the roof, take a listen to what’s going on in there.’
‘Too risky,’ Pascoe said. ‘If he thinks there’s anything like that going on, he might do something stupid.’
‘We don’t even know the gun is loaded.’ Chivers stabbed at the monitor again. ‘He’s a newsagent, for Christ’s sake.’
Donnelly looked at Pascoe. She shook her head.
‘We do something without really thinking it through,’ she said, ‘and he’ll be the one making the news.’
NINE
Helen listened, waiting and hoping for some reaction.
Akhtar had been in his shop for ten minutes or more, while for most of that time, from the front of the building, a woman’s voice had echoed – crackling and tinny – through a loudhailer.
‘We just want to talk, Mr Akhtar. We need to know that everyone’s all right in there. If we could start some kind of dialogue on the phone, we could begin talking about how we’re going to resolve this. How we can get you what you want without anybody getting hurt.’
When he finally came back into the storeroom, Akhtar was carrying an armful of chocolate bars and bags of crisps. He stood a few steps away from where Helen and Mitchell were chained to the radiator and stared down at them.
‘So, what do you think?’ Helen asked.
