‘You did cry though, eventually?’
‘Eventually.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘What?’
‘Did it feel good, I mean?’
Helen thought about it, tried to remember. ‘Like finally eating something when you’ve been starving. But it tastes foul. Sour.’
‘Because I still haven’t cried for Amin,’ Akhtar said. ‘Not for the right reasons, anyway. Not because I’ve lost a son.’ He leaned towards her and offered the key. ‘There will be plenty of time for that though. In prison, if that is the way this ends.’
Helen said, ‘Yes,’ and took the key, the ‘if’ ringing in her head.
‘Everything is finished one way or another,’ Akhtar said. ‘After what I did to Mr Mitchell.’
‘I’ll tell them what happened.’
He shrugged as though it did not matter. As though he had already resigned himself to life in prison, or worse. ‘I will cry for Amin before this ends,’ he said. ‘I’ll cry for him when I know why.’
FORTY-EIGHT
‘I’m just saying these things because someone needs to,’ Holland told him. ‘That’s all.’
‘Point taken,’ Thorne said.
‘We go in there half-arsed and it goes pear-shaped, Bridges’ defence team will have a field day.’
Thorne drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. ‘Not as much of a field day as the prosecution’s going to have.’ He continued to stare out of the car window, towards the row of houses opposite, the green front door of the run-down Edwardian conversion, the bay window of the ground-floor flat. ‘All the forensics we’ve got… ’
The SOCO who had been running the fingerprints from the Peter Allen crime scene had called Thorne on his way to Hounslow; the address Jonathan Bridges had provided to the DSS when he had last signed on. The officer had been disappointed at coming second to his female colleague, at missing out on the promised bottle of whisky, but Thorne had taken pains to let him know just how grateful he was for the information. If the ADAPT DNA match was unlikely to stand up in court, the fingerprint evidence certainly would.
These, though, were things Thorne would worry about later on.
Right now, he was more concerned with getting the information that might see Helen Weeks and Stephen Mitchell released than he was with putting anyone away for Peter Allen’s murder.
‘Never mind half-arsed,’ Kitson said from the back seat. ‘What if he’s armed?’
Thorne glanced at his rear-view mirror. Kitson was sitting next to DS Sam Karim. ‘Nothing in his record about firearms,’ he said. He thought about the offence of which Bridges had most recently been convicted. ‘Everyone’s wearing stab-vests, right?’
‘It would be nice to know what was waiting for us, that’s all.’
‘If he’s even in there,’ Thorne said. He was almost certain that their prime suspect would not be inside, but he understood Yvonne Kitson’s concerns. She was speaking not just for herself, Holland and Karim, but for the support officers drafted in at short notice. The four other detectives sitting behind them in an unmarked Ford Galaxy and the two more at the back of the house had no knowledge of the connection between Jonathan Bridges and the armed siege in Tulse Hill; no understanding of the urgency or the disregard for standard procedure.
‘Be nice to know that too,’ Kitson said.
‘What do you want me to do, Yvonne?’
‘ Think. Just think.’
Normally, there would have been a careful assessment of the premises front and back. Intelligence would be fed through to the officers on the ground via the kind of technical support that was being employed at Tulse Hill at that very moment. There would have been an open line of communication with senior officers back at headquarters, an adequate briefing and a cordon that amounted to rather more than a panda car parked at either end of the street.
There would not have been a strategy formulated on the hoof.
But Thorne could not afford to waste minutes, let alone hours. ‘I think I’ll just pop across and ring the bell,’ he said.
Holland shifted in the passenger seat. ‘Gives him time to get rid of anything he might not want us to find.’
‘Nobody’s coming up with any better suggestions.’
‘If he is in there, he’s probably off his face anyway,’ Kitson said.
Thorne reached for the radio that was sitting on the dash then opened the door. ‘With a bit of luck, I might not need you lot at all,’ he said.
He zipped up his leather jacket as he crossed the road. Anyone watching from that bay window would have a clear view and Thorne wanted to hide the Met Police logo on his stab-vest. He walked slowly, aware that there might be eyes on him other than those of his fellow officers, conscious of the fact that he did not look a lot like the average delivery man and bugger all like a Jehovah’s Witness.
A strip of paper beneath the top bell said Dawson. There was no name beneath the bottom one. Thorne rang it.
Waited.
If he had thought there might be anyone besides Bridges inside the property, Thorne would have made an effort to acquire the phone number. It was common practice to call the suspect inside and suggest that they come out of their own volition to avoid the possibility of other family members getting hurt. There was nothing to suggest that Bridges had so much as a girlfriend.
Thorne did not care a great deal about Bridges getting hurt.
He gave it another few seconds then took out his radio. ‘Not a sound, Yvonne,’ he said.
‘Like I said, he might be out of it.’
‘Makes our job even easier then, doesn’t it.’
‘I’m still not thrilled about this, Tom.’
‘It’s on my head,’ Thorne said. ‘Put the door in… ’
A few seconds later, the doors of the BMW and the Galaxy opened simultaneously and half a dozen officers began running across the road. Two others moved quickly to the boot of the Galaxy then followed their colleagues carrying a metal battering ram.
A little less polite than Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Thorne stepped to one side as they crashed first through the outer door and then through the door to the downstairs flat. Thorne was only a few steps behind them, but it was not a large flat and by the time he had heard the first officer shout, ‘Room clear,’ it had become obvious that the man he was looking for was not at home. He started to take off his vest.
‘Bedroom clear,’ Holland shouted.
It would have been nice of course, but Thorne had known that Bridges was unlikely to be sitting there waiting for them. He had made a decent attempt to clean up after killing Peter Allen, and whoever had employed him to do it would almost certainly want to do the same thing themselves. They would want Bridges well out of the way.
It had already crossed Thorne’s mind that this might mean permanently. Sitting outside in the car, he had been forced to consider the possibility that there might be nothing but another body waiting for them. Another brick wall.
Back to waiting…
As he stood in the middle of the living room, he saw that someone had been living at the property until very recently. There were several empty pizza boxes by the side of the sofa, a TV listings magazine from the previous week, a pub-sized ashtray overflowing with butts. As the team filed one by one into the room, including those who had been ready at the back of the house, Thorne stared at the beer cans lined up on the mantelpiece, the labels all
