THREE WEEKS LATER
LIKE A HOLIDAY
SEVENTY-TWO
‘Got everything back then,’ Thorne said.
Antoine Daniels was sitting on the edge of his bunk, leaning forward to stare at the TV screen in the corner and using a joystick to control a zombie or a soldier or an alien or whatever was noisily killing equally unidentifiable creatures on his PlayStation. His room was on the Gold wing and, though it had the same basic layout as the one in which he and Thorne had last spoken, the furnishings were a little less basic, presumably because the occupant was trusted not to smash everything up on a regular basis. As well as the television and games console, there was carpet of a sort on the floor and – surely the biggest perk of all – an ensuite shower. Though he instantly despised himself for thinking it, Thorne decided that he had stayed in marginally worse hotels.
Daniels shrugged. ‘I’ll lose it all again.’
‘Why?’ Thorne stood in the doorway to Daniels’ bathroom. He could see the small tablets of soap and the bottles of shampoo all neatly lined up on a shelf above the sink.
‘Because someone will say something that winds me up and I’ll twat them.’ The boy screwed up his face as he performed a complicated on-screen manoeuvre. ‘Someone always says something.’
‘About Amin?’
‘About all sorts of things, man. Amin, yeah… ’
‘They know what happened?’
‘Whispers going round, you know how it works. Doesn’t matter to some of these boys how he died, why he was killed, any of that. He’ll always be the “Paki poof”, you know? My Paki poof.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No need,’ Daniels said.
Thorne did know how it worked among the inmates, but though such things were rarely an enormous surprise, the reaction in other areas to the circumstances surrounding Amin Akhtar’s death had been even sadder and more depressing.
There was talk of an official inquiry, but it remained muted.
Twenty minutes earlier, over tea in his office, Roger Bracewell had run fingers through his floppy hair and thanked Thorne for his sterling efforts in uncovering the truth. He took great pains to describe his profound shock and sadness at what had happened at Barndale. He said ‘shocked’ three times and ‘saddened’ twice.
Thorne had counted.
Several times he had simply said Ian McCarthy’s name, then sat there shaking his head, as though momentarily dumbfounded at the actions of his former colleague. When he was being somewhat more talkative, he told Thorne that Barndale’s peripatetic art teacher had initiated a special project in tribute to Amin Akhtar. Those boys who were contemporaries of Amin would be given the opportunity in class to create paintings or collages that summed up their memories of their murdered friend and their feelings about what had happened. The work would then be displayed in some of the prison corridors as a permanent reminder of tragic and unacceptable events.
‘On the Gold wing, probably,’ Bracewell had said. ‘You know, if we want them to remain permanent… ’
Daniels set his joystick down, though Thorne could not be sure if his game had finished or not. ‘Did you come specially to see me?’ he asked.
‘You deserve to be told exactly what happened,’ Thorne said. ‘And I wanted you to know that the reason Amin never told you about that stuff in his past was because he was trying to forget about it. I think you were helping him forget.’
Daniels smiled, then looked embarrassed about it. ‘The doctor and that other one are going to prison for a long time, right?’
‘It’s not up to me.’
‘Definite though, yeah?’
‘I hope so,’ Thorne said. ‘All three of them.’
While Prosser recovered slowly in hospital after life-saving surgery, McCarthy and Powell were on remand for conspiracy to commit murder. Rumour had it that Powell was already talking about a deal of some sort, but it was out of Thorne’s hands now. He did know that when it came to a reduction in charge or sentence sought, both men stood more of a chance than Nadira Akhtar. She was in Holloway, awaiting trial for the attempted murder of Jeffrey Prosser, while her husband had been charged not only with kidnapping but with the murder of Stephen Mitchell. As things stood, both faced the possibility of life sentences, but there was at least a glimmer of hope for Javed Akhtar. Carl Oldman, who had offered to defend him, told Thorne that having seen the statement made by Sergeant Helen Weeks, the CPS were considering a reduction in the charge to one of manslaughter.
‘I won’t be able to keep him out of prison,’ Oldman said. ‘But bearing in mind everything that happened, I’m hopeful we’d get a jury that was sympathetic. Not to mention a judge, of course.’
Javed Akhtar would at least get the fair hearing his son had been denied.
‘What about the kid that actually did it?’ Daniels asked. ‘The Scottish one.’
Johnno Bridges had yet to surface, but Thorne was confident that he would. ‘We’ll find him.’ He stepped out of the doorway and walked over to where a row of drawings had been taped to the wall. ‘It might well be dead behind a skip somewhere with a needle in his arm. But he’ll turn up.’
Daniels leaned forward to pick up the joystick again. ‘Good of you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Coming back. You didn’t have to.’
Thorne walked to the door. ‘You got a year left, right?’
‘Eleven months.’
‘Then what?’
‘See what happens.’
‘Try and make sure you don’t come back.’
‘I hope he is alive when you find him,’ Daniels said. ‘The one that gave Amin the drugs. Be nice to get him back in here.’ He glanced up at Thorne for just a second before he started playing his game again. ‘Then I’d definitely lose my fancy room.’
Daniels was not the only boy Thorne had wanted to see on his return to Barndale. While talking to the governor, he had asked after the two boys he had met in the library last time he was here. He discovered that Darren Murray had been released two days earlier. ‘Pleased as punch at becoming a father,’ Bracewell had told Thorne with a knowing smirk.
Thorne guessed that the boy’s maths had not improved, but decided that it was probably best that way for all concerned. The other boy, Aziz Kamali, was still an inmate, but as yet Thorne had not seen him. On his way to the Gold wing, he had put his head round the door to the library, but the boy was not there. Now, walking back towards the main entrance, Thorne watched as Shakir, the imam, came sweeping around a corner with a gaggle of eight or nine followers close behind him. Though now wearing the obligatory skullcap, and looking a lot more serious than he had done that day in the library, Thorne recognised Aziz Kamali among them.
On spotting Thorne, the imam and his followers changed course, veering towards him like an articulated lorry switching lanes.
Shakir told Thorne how pleased he was to see him. He talked about Amin in reverential tones and made the same sorts of noises the governor had made. Thorne waited politely for the priest to finish, then stared over his head and spoke directly to Aziz.
The boy would not look at him.
‘Given up on the science then?’ Thorne said.
SEVENTY-THREE
