102
Many things can go concealed in the hurly-burly of family life. Shahid and Usman had not spoken or interacted in any way for four months – and nobody else in the family had noticed. For the last two of those months, Usman had been in Lahore with their mother, taking a break from London, reacquainting himself with Pakistani life, and very nearly arranging to get married to a lawyer’s fourth daughter. He had been so close to deciding to do it that he had had to go away to think it over, so here he was in London again, and much more relieved to be back than he wanted to admit. Usman was coming to think that your roots were not necessarily the same thing as your home, but he didn’t yet know what to make of the thought.
On the morning after he got back, he went to see Shahid at his flat. He noticed that his brother had installed a CCTV camera over the door; there was a pause and he was buzzed in. Shahid was standing at the top of the stairs. It’s not easy to look dignified and outraged while wearing an open dressing gown with a pair of Y-fronts clearly visible, but Shahid was managing to do it.
‘You little shit,’ he said. ‘I know it was you.’
‘This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “Please let me explain,”’ said Usman.
‘Fuck you. Fuck your explanation. I was in a cell for nineteen days because of you. And don’t for a moment, don’t for a single moment, think I didn’t know right from the start who was to blame for that stupid stunt. In fact the only thing I blame myself for is not having realised the first time I saw those stupid postcards. “We Want What You Have”. I should have thought, let me see. Who’s stupid enough to think this is interesting, lazy enough so he doesn’t have a proper job so he has the time to do it, enough of a political cretin to think it’s a significant gesture of some sort, retarded enough to keep doing it even after it starts to get people worked up, and just enough of a geek to do it on the web? Stupid, lazy, politically cretinised, retarded, spends all his time wanking on the internet. Oh of course! My younger brother!’
Shahid was still standing at the top of the stairs.
‘Can I come up now?’ said Usman. Shahid stepped back from the stairwell and Usman took that as a yes. He trudged up. Shahid was stood at the sink with his arms folded. Usman sat down and took a breath.
‘Look, I know it makes no difference, and I know it’s too late, but I’m sorry. I’m genuinely and deeply sorry. When you were arrested I assumed it was to do with that idiot fake jihadi. It was only the day before you got out that the lawyer said something to mother and Ahmed about the blog and I realised that was involved. But it didn’t make any sense! I stopped doing that stuff back at the start of the year! I took the site down, everything. And then someone must have screen-scraped all the pictures because someone puts them back up again and starts doing that extra-freaky shit with dead birds and trashing cars and everything and I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t mean things to get out of hand. I didn’t think people would get themselves in such a twist. And all because they thought it might affect property prices! You make a point about Western obliviousness and they think it’s about property prices. You tell them they’re in a condition of complete moral unconsciousness and they worry about whether their house is still worth two million quid! Unbelievable. Then they decide you’re a terrorist.’
‘It wasn’t you who-’ began Shahid, and Usman held up his hand.
‘I know – it was you who ended up in Paddington Green. But that wasn’t the idea, they got it all wrong, it was that idiot Iqbal, if he hadn’t…’ Usman trailed off. Shahid just sat there.
‘You had my password,’ he said. ‘You were logged on through my IP address.’
‘I got it in the cafe downstairs,’ said Usman. ‘They get your wireless pretty much full-strength. I worked out your password.’
Shahid’s password, as it happened, was Shakira123.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
‘Remember when you got the broadband put in? That summer? All the time you were singing and humming that Shakira tune. The one about “I’m on tonight” and “hips don’t lie”. For about six weeks it was all you talked about. I was going through a… through a strict phase and you did it to wind me up. So the first time I tried your password I guessed Shakira. But that didn’t work. So then I thought for a bit and remembered back when we were kids. Remember when you were about ten and I was five? You had a little electronic safe. Dad gave it to you not long before he died. Birthday present I think it was. And you and I spent a lot of time together at that point, you sort of looked after me and we were very close. And you told me your password was Usman123, so I remembered that and I tried it on Shakira. Shakira123.’
There was a long silence.
‘Fuck you,’ Shahid eventually said again. Usman smiled and got up. He fished out his wallet, took out a card and gave it to Shahid. It had a mobile phone number on it.
‘What, I call this and I get to go to jail again, this time for drugs?’
‘Remember that girl you met on the Underground? You liked her, got her number, then lost it, you put an ad in “Lost Connections”, she never saw it, that was the last you heard of her?’
‘How do you know she never saw it?’
Usman shrugged. ‘She told me. That’s her mobile number.’ He made for the door. ‘And in case you’re wondering, no it wasn’t easy.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Shahid to his brother’s back, though with less conviction this time.
103
In the days after his visit to Shahid Kamal at Paddington Green station, DI Mill had come to a conclusion about the enquiries he had been making into the Pepys Road harassment campaign. He had talked it over with the DC who’d been working with him, and they agreed: We Want What You Have was two different series of events, run by two different people or sets of people. For the first few months, the postcards and website and the DVDs were the work of a person or persons with a local interest but no particular animus at any individual. There was something almost abstract about it: no people in the photos, no abuse, no criminal damage. That person, whoever he or she was, had a link to Shahid Kamal; at the very least, he or she had hacked into his internet access; more likely, it was someone known to him. Then the whole thing went away for a while. Then it came back with someone else behind it, someone who did not have that link to Mr Kamal – or if he or she did, he or she was for some reason now eager to conceal the link. This person was much angrier with the people of Pepys Road. He or she had a darker sensibility. His or her acts began with graffiti and abuse and turned to vandalism, criminal damage against property and the use of dead animals. This person or persons seemed to be escalating his or her or their campaign. The first person (s) had arguably not broken any laws; you could probably slap an ASBO on them, get them to promise not to do anything similar again, and leave it at that. The second person(s) had certainly broken several laws, probably enough to earn a custodial sentence. But the blog was registered behind several layers of anonymous identity, and there were no fingerprints anywhere. Now that police patrols were taking an extra interest in Pepys Road after the cars were vandalised, there had been no further activity. The blog had been taken down. So Mill was closer to knowing the sort of person he was looking for without knowing who it was.
He wasn’t worried. Mill was sure something else would happen. Most detective cases are solved by hard routine work, or by luck – the latter category including stupid mistakes by the criminal. Experience taught Mill that he would have to wait for a piece of luck. Until it came, he mentally parked the issue and got on with other work. His feeling was that he wouldn’t have to wait long, and he was right. The break came out of the blue, two months after Shahid Kamal was released from prison. His DC came up to his desk, smile lines etched deep around his eyes, and without comment passed him an issue of the
EXPOSED: ARTIST KNOWN AS SMITTY
His artworks are controversial, his stunts infamous. His provocative graffiti have travelled the journey from Underground station walls to prestigious art galleries. He makes collectors’ pieces which sell for millions. But nobody knows who he is. His name is Smitty, but his identity is one of the art world’s best-kept secrets. Until today,
