found out about the hostage’s death in some other way. All the same, he could hardly admit that he had known and said nothing. ‘That gunshot on the first night.’
‘We don’t know what happened,’ Pascoe said. ‘We can only assume that Weeks had no choice but to pretend everything was normal. I should have sussed there was something wrong, but I didn’t.’
‘You blaming yourself for this?’
‘I fucked up.’
‘How long until they go in?’ Thorne asked.
‘Under an hour.’
Thorne watched Prosser filling his glass. Still smiling.
‘Where are you?’
Thorne told her, his eyes on Prosser as the judge walked back across the living room, moving calmly through a gaggle of partygoers. A nod and a wink to someone he recognised, something whispered, a hand laid on an arm. Watching, Thorne recalled how Ian McCarthy had reacted to those initial accusations. The doctor had tried to appear confident and fearless, but the anxiety had been all too obvious and Thorne had been able to smell the man’s weakness, sharp as disinfectant.
Prosser, though, seemed genuinely unafraid of anything.
‘Tom?’
‘I’m still here,’ Thorne said.
‘Well anyway, I just thought you should know. If there’s anything you might have that could persuade Akhtar to give up and walk out of there before Chivers and his mates go crashing in, you need to get back here with it on the hurry-up… ’
When Thorne had hung up, he walked across and took hold of Prosser by the arm.
Making it up as you go along again?
Prosser tried to pull away, but Thorne dug his fingers into the flab of the judge’s forearm.
Thinking about the promise he’d made to Javed Akhtar.
The assurances he’d given Helen Weeks.
He prised the heavy tumbler from Prosser’s hand, wondering – just for a second – how it would feel to smash it against the table and grind the jagged edge into the mottled flesh of the man’s neck. He set it down and guided Prosser none too gently towards the door.
‘Hell are we going?’ Prosser demanded, still trying to wrench his arm from Thorne’s grip.
Thorne dug his fingers in harder.
He called Holland as soon as they were in the lift and told him that they were going to be swapping vehicles. Unlike his own car, the Passat was fitted with Blues and Twos and Thorne guessed that the siren might save him a few precious minutes. He told Holland and Kitson to call up a van, to make it two. He told them to get straight up to the penthouse party and start nicking people for fun.
Then he turned to Prosser.
‘How do you feel about restorative justice?’
SIXTY-SIX
‘I haven’t been telling you the truth,’ Helen said. ‘Not that I’ve been lying, exactly, just not telling the truth, and I want to be honest. Here… like this. I need to be honest.’
Since they had called and demanded to speak to Mitchell, Akhtar had been prowling back and forth like one of those creatures in a zoo that have gone slightly mad. From storeroom to shop and back again. As though it were only a question of which way they were going to come for him.
Now, he stopped and stood a few feet in front of her, holding the gun.
Waiting.
‘I can’t say for certain that Paul was Alfie’s father,’ Helen said. ‘That’s it, basically.’ She looked up at him. ‘That’s the truth of it. I know I’ve been talking as though he is, and that’s the way I always talk, even to myself, but the fact is I can’t be certain. Paul wasn’t certain either, which was why things were so difficult between us when he was killed. He died not knowing one way or another.’
Akhtar backed slowly away until he reached the desk and lowered himself on to the chair. ‘Why are you telling me these things?’
‘I don’t really know,’ she said.
Why was she telling a man who had threatened to kill her, knowing full well that at the same time she was announcing it to whoever was listening in on the outside? Why did she feel the need suddenly to get this stuff off her chest? Did she really think she would absolve herself?
Because she knew that Akhtar was right and it was only a question of how and not when they would be coming in. Because although the men with the guns would do everything they could to avoid discharging their weapons and to keep her safe, things did not always go according to plan. Because people got over-excited and accidents happened.
Because she did not want to die without saying it.
‘Because I need to tell someone,’ she said.
Akhtar looked at her, cocked his head slightly. He rested the gun on his knee, the barrel pointing towards her. ‘I am a newsagent,’ he said. ‘Not a priest.’
Helen’s impulse was to smile back, but her mouth could do no more than say the words. Her tongue felt thick and heavy and her heart was thundering against her chest.
‘I met a man on a course,’ she said. ‘A firearms officer, of all things. Right now, I’d be seriously thinking that he might be one of the ones out there with a gun in his hand, except that he moved away, after what happened to Paul…
‘It was a fling, that’s all. Stupid. Just half a dozen times in some hotel or other and I’m not saying that as any kind of excuse. I still did what I did, and at the time I wanted to do it. He was everything Paul wasn’t, in all sorts of ways. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed being wanted that much. I’m just saying that I never actually thought about leaving Paul, that’s all. He was the one who talked about leaving, when he found out. It was awful for a while and things never got back to how they’d been before, but we decided we were going to carry on.
‘For the baby’s sake.
‘Things were said when it all came out. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. Horrible things, but I knew he was only saying them because he’d been hurt and because he wanted to hurt me back. I was happy to take whatever he was dishing out, because I knew I deserved it, and I thought everything would be all right because of the baby. I just kept telling myself that it would all be OK once the baby came along.
‘After Paul was killed, guilt was one of the things that made me so desperate to find out what had happened. The main thing, if I’m honest. Just like I’d been kidding myself about the baby solving all our problems, I told myself that if I found out what had happened to Paul, if I found out the truth, I might feel a bit less guilty about what I’d done to him.
‘Like I say, kidding myself.’
Helen was leaning back with her head against the radiator, her eyes fixed on a space a few feet above Akhtar’s head, and she did not see him grimace and look away.
SIXTY-SEVEN
However unafraid Prosser might have appeared at the party, it was clear from his face, from the occasional whimper that escaped his lips, that he was a little less bullish when it came to being driven at seventy miles an hour through the dark of busy urban streets, with rain lashing against the windscreen, a siren wailing and a blue light flashing on the roof.
‘You’re a bit pale,’ Thorne said. ‘A bit quiet.’
