‘And an address for the prison hospital officer who was suspended would be good. I’ve got her name but, you know, it would save me the trouble of finding her.’
‘I’ll get him to dig it out,’ the governor said.
‘Anything that might save a bit of time.’
‘Yes, well, I can understand now why this is such a kick-bollock scramble.’
Thorne looked at him.
‘One of my officers saw something about this siege business in the early edition of the Standard. Not many details, but he recognised the name and we put two and two together.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Bloody awful.’
‘Grief can do very strange things to people,’ Shakir said. ‘It can affect their… judgement.’
Thorne said nothing, but the imam was right of course. Thorne knew the way that the loss of a loved one could play havoc with the lives of those left behind. He had watched absurdly cheerful denial become uncontrollable rage and seen rage turn in on itself and fester into self-loathing. Not as quick perhaps as a blade or a bullet, but just as dangerous.
So it made sense to question Javed Akhtar’s judgement. To put his accusations down to grief – pure, simple and terrible – and to dismiss the suggestions of a bereaved parent as paranoia, just as police, coroner and jury had done.
None of that helped Helen Weeks though.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Thorne said.
Behind him the governor wished him luck and Shakir said, ‘Go well.’
Thorne reached for the door. Thinking: nothing wrong with my judgement.
Back on the wing, there were dozens of boys engaged in afternoon association. For some, this meant the gym or table tennis, but the majority seemed to prefer hanging around doing nothing in particular. Thorne had heard their voices and those of the prison officers echoing from the landings as he had walked out of the admin block. Now, turning towards the main entrance, he saw that he would need to make his way between small groups of boys huddled in corners, drifting in twos and threes along the main corridor or gathered in larger numbers at the tops and bottoms of staircases.
Whatever the numbers, the gatherings appeared to be strictly divided.
White. Black. Asian.
As a couple of the younger ones stepped out of the way ahead of him, Thorne recognised the boy he had seen in the library. He was probably eighteen or so, with close-cropped hair and a physique that suggested he spent more time working out than he did reading. He was leaning against a wall opposite as though he’d been waiting, and looked away when Thorne spotted him.
Thorne walked across the corridor.
He remembered what Aziz had told him and guessed this was the same boy that Dawes had questioned two months earlier. The boy who had visited Amin in the hospital wing.
‘You’re Antoine Daniels, right?’
The boy was not looking at him. He sniffed and gave a small nod.
‘I’d like to talk to you about Amin.’
‘I don’t want to talk about him.’ The voice was deep, the accent straight out of Hackney or Harlesden.
‘Yes, you do,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s why you were waiting for me.’ He waited until it was clear that he was not going anywhere; until the boy finally turned and looked at him. ‘You were Amin’s friend. You’re the one person I should be talking to.’
Daniels carefully watched the comings and goings for another half a minute, then pushed himself from the wall. He brushed Thorne’s shoulder as he went past, and cast the smallest of backward glances as he walked away.
The invitation to follow him seemed obvious enough.
They walked for five minutes or more, Thorne ten or so steps behind, and Daniels staying close to the walls as they moved into a recreation area and through a large group gathered around a pool table. All the boys were wearing their cargos and Ts, the only badge of individuality being the training shoes each had chosen to wear. Many had these sent in by family from outside and could have them taken away for bad behaviour, but for those who kept them, the cost and style told others a great deal about the wearer.
The trainers, and how you chose to walk in them.
You strutted, you shuffled, you pimp-rolled.
I’m confident. I’m harmless. I’m a bad-man.
With the squeals of rubber soles against the vinyl floor fading behind them, they climbed up to a second-floor landing and along a corridor until, after a few minutes, Daniels calmly turned and walked into a cell.
When Thorne arrived at the doorway, Daniels was standing in the corner, urinating into the metal toilet bowl. Thorne said, ‘Sorry,’ and turned away. He waited until he heard the flush and when he turned around again and stepped inside, Daniels was sitting on the edge of his bunk.
‘Push the door to,’ he said.
Thorne did as he was asked, then leaned back against the door. The cell was the same size as the room he had seen in the hospital wing, but the bricks had been painted rather than plastered. The bed was cemented to the wall – a blue, rubberised mattress and neatly folded grey blanket – as was the desk, no bigger than a tea tray. The same ‘robust’ furnishings as could be found in all but those few rooms assigned to the orderlies or those on the Gold wing. Thorne wondered how the Polish boy he had heard about earlier could possibly have smashed up such a room without the use of a sledgehammer.
‘Antoine’s an interesting name,’ he said. ‘French?’
Daniels shrugged. ‘Only bit of French in me is fries, far as I know.’
There were a few pictures stuck to the pin-board above the bed, animals and ships, painted by numbers. Thorne noticed that along the edge of the small desk, cartons of juice and sachets of jam hoarded from breakfast grab-bags had been lined up meticulously, the labels all facing the same way. He saw the same order displayed in the rows of small shampoo bottles and squares of soap that had been arranged above the sink. It might have been pride or a simple method of telling if anyone had been inside the room. It might have been both.
‘How long you been in?’
‘Two years and a bit.’ Daniels glanced up. ‘One more to go.’
Thorne knew better than to ask what the boy was in for. He guessed, with a sentence that long, that he’d done more than steal a car or get caught with a bit of blow. ‘So did you and Amin become friends quickly after he came in?’
‘I suppose.’
‘You looked after him.’
‘Just showed him the ropes, that’s all.’ Daniels’ face gave little away. He was very dark-skinned and, up close, Thorne could see the skin was pitted with acne scars. ‘He didn’t need looking after.’
‘No?’
‘He was no threat to anyone.’
‘What about the kid who attacked him?’
‘Yeah, that was strange,’ he said. ‘Usually in this place you hear whispers, you know? You hear when something’s likely to kick off or if someone’s after someone else. That just came out of nowhere.’
‘You hear any whispers about who might have done it?’
‘Maybe,’ Daniels said, after a few seconds. ‘One name, but as far as I know he wasn’t even someone Amin had ever spoken to and anyway he was out of here two days after it happened, so… ’
‘So no time for you to do anything about it.’
Daniels said nothing.
‘Any chance it was one of the imam’s boys?’
Daniels grunted. ‘They’re not happy when they get knocked back, that’s for sure. Like it’s an… affront or something, you know?’ He thought for a few seconds then shook his head. ‘Amin wasn’t interested in any of that stuff, but I don’t think they’d take it quite that personally.’
‘Why wasn’t he interested?’
‘Just wasn’t.’
