‘How’s Stephen?’
‘He’s… doing OK.’
Pascoe took a deep breath. ‘Can I talk to Javed, Helen?’
There was a pause. Pascoe imagined Helen looking towards Akhtar for a response. Looking at the gun. She listened for his voice, prepared herself.
Thinking: active listening, validation, reassurance.
‘He doesn’t want to,’ Helen said.
Pascoe raised her voice. ‘Javed, can you hear me? If you can hear me, I’d really like to speak to you, if that’s all right.’
‘I only want to speak to Thorne,’ Akhtar shouted.
‘I understand that, Javed,’ Pascoe said. ‘You only want to speak to Tom Thorne.’ She took care to repeat the hostage taker’s words, just as she had been taught, to focus the attention on him and make it clear that she had understood his wishes. ‘We will definitely make sure that happens, but right now he’s not here. He’s busy trying to gather the information you wanted.’
‘Not “information”,’ Akhtar shouted. ‘ Truth. They are not the same thing… not the same thing at all.’
‘No, of course they aren’t,’ Pascoe said, careful to show concern, but not to talk down. To let him know she felt the same way about these things as he did. ‘We do understand what you want, Javed.’
Akhtar said nothing.
‘Nadira’s here, Javed.’ She paused for a few seconds, deliberately. ‘She’s here and she wants to talk to you.’
‘ No.’
Pascoe had to move quickly, before Akhtar had a chance to hang up. She beckoned his wife across and nodded to her. The woman glanced at the listening officers as she took the phone. Donnelly raised two hands and mouthed, ‘Nice and calm.’
‘Javed… ’ Nadira Akhtar sounded as nervous as she looked. She gave a hesitant smile when Pascoe reached out to lay a hand on her arm. ‘It’s me.’
‘I can’t talk now,’ Akhtar said.
‘You need to talk to me, OK?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘This is ridiculous, Javee.’
Akhtar said something in Hindi then and Nadira said, ‘No, you need to tell me.’ He spoke in Hindi again, for longer this time. Pascoe looked across at Donnelly and shrugged. Even though there was a translator standing within earshot – a young woman poised with notepad and pencil – it had been agreed that Nadira would try and talk to her husband in English. Nadira looked at Pascoe, panic-stricken. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘He won’t talk to me in English.’
‘It’s OK,’ Pascoe said. ‘Just keep talking to him.’
They spoke for several minutes more. Akhtar did most of the talking, shouting at first, then growing calmer as he said the same thing over and over, while his wife tried and failed to interject, until eventually she gave up and began to weep.
When Akhtar ended the call, Pascoe took the phone and stood up to put an arm around the woman’s shoulders. She looked at Donnelly as she told her how well she had done, while Nadira shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Donnelly nodded the translator across, but Nadira waved her away. She wanted to tell them herself.
‘He says he loves us all very much and that he’s sorry.’ She fought back a sob. ‘This is for Amin, he says. All for Amin. He says that he owes it to him to do this.’ She lowered her head. ‘He is happy to offer his life back to Allah if need be, but he has no choice. Everyone’s life… ’
The tears came again and she made no effort to stop them. Donnelly quickly beckoned the WPC who was working as family liaison officer to escort her away. Nadira turned to say sorry one more time as she was led from the hall, but Donnelly, Pascoe and Chivers had already moved into a huddle.
‘I didn’t like the sound of that last bit,’ Chivers said. ‘Offering his life back. Heard that a few too many times.’
‘He’s not a terrorist,’ Pascoe said.
‘Isn’t he?’
Donnelly raised his hands and tried to speak, but Pascoe was not about to let Chivers have the last word.
‘He’s just a father who’s lost his son, so let’s not go throwing labels around.’ Her responsibility as a negotiator began and ended with the safety of the hostages. That meant maintaining an atmosphere of calm and making sure that nobody – fellow officers included – got over-excited.
Chivers made no attempt to hide a sneer. Donnelly asked both of them if they had quite finished. Pascoe – calling on every ounce of training and experience when it came to reading people and making judgements about personality and state of mind – decided that Chivers was a twat.
‘Right… ’ Donnelly said.
They all turned at the sound of raised voices in the corridor, and moved quickly when somebody screamed and what sounded like a full-blown slanging match began to erupt. Donnelly led the way, charging out of the hall and towards the classroom that had been set up as a family liaison area.
They entered the classroom to see a WPC struggling to hold back a young black woman who was raging at a terrified Nadira Akhtar. She called her a bitch and swore that if anything happened to her husband, she would make her and her family pay for it.
Donnelly shouted, demanding to know what was going on.
‘Sorry, sir.’ The red-faced WPC finally managed to gain some control over the woman. ‘This is Stephen Mitchell’s wife. I didn’t know where else to put her.’
Pascoe took Nadira’s arm and led her from the room. Chivers raised an eyebrow and followed them.
Donnelly glared at the WPC. ‘Nice job,’ he said.
SIXTEEN
When Thorne eventually got to the library, he spread the files out across a table in the corner and spent fifteen minutes tracing Amin Akhtar’s journey, from first court appearance to funeral.
As was the case with all young offenders sent down from the Old Bailey, Amin had been transferred to Feltham YOI, the same place in which he had spent five months on remand after his arrest. From there, he was eventually assigned to Barndale to serve what would be the first half of his eight-year sentence, before moving into the adult prison system.
Despite the circumstances of the offence and the nature of the boy who had committed it, the court had handed down a sentence at the high end of the scale. It had clearly been Amin’s misfortune to come up in front of a judge determined to be tough on knife crime. Even so, it was little wonder that Amin’s legal team had spent six months mounting a vigorous appeal, which would now of course never be heard.
Arguably, Helen Weeks was now a victim of that same misfortune.
Thorne made a mental note to talk to Amin’s solicitor and sent Brigstocke a text asking him to get hold of the phone number.
He looked up from the paperwork at the sound of laughter from two boys huddled around a computer at the far end of the library. Along with an older boy who sat engrossed in a book near the door, they were the only inmates in the place and thankfully seemed uninterested in Thorne’s presence. The boys at the computer giggled again and the female PO at the desk raised her eyes from a copy of Closer. Told them to keep the noise down.
Thorne guessed that Amin Akhtar had spent a good deal of time in this room that smelled of polish and something else. Damp, perhaps. He opened the police report and took out the photographs of the boy’s body that lay on top of the file; the lips drawn back across the teeth, the blood caked around his chin and dried like streaks of rust on his neck.
