Mark Billingham - Good as Dead

Nadira had other children, a life to live, a business to keep afloat. It was understandable that she should at least seem to have adjusted to the death of her youngest child so much better than Javed.

‘You’ll need to help him,’ Thorne said.

Before Nadira could answer, her mobile rang. She fished it from her bag, then spoke in Hindi for a few minutes. She sounded agitated, but had calmed down by the time she ended the call.

‘My eldest son,’ she explained. ‘He is waiting for me back there, with the police. He is very upset.’

‘I’ll get you back as soon as I can.’ Thorne checked in his rear-view and raised a hand to the driver of the squad car that had followed him from south London. The squad car flashed its lights in acknowledgement. ‘There’s an officer on the scene who specialises in these situations,’ he said. ‘She thinks you might be able to help. That it might be good if you talked to Javed.’

‘We would only argue,’ Nadira said. ‘He won’t listen to me.’

‘Will you try?’

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

‘There’s a woman in there with your husband who has a young child. She’s very scared.’

‘He won’t hurt anyone.’

‘Are you certain about that?’

She reached into her bag and produced a wad of tissues. She clutched it in her fist. ‘Before Amin died, I would have laughed out loud if you had told me what Javed was doing. Like it was some practical joke off a TV show or something. He would never hurt anyone, you know? If there were boys in the shop stealing things or messing around, he would talk to them. He would ask them very quietly why they were wasting their time taking chocolate bars or what have you, until they felt guilty and most of the time they would not do it again. He taught them respect. He was always calm and he would never raise his hand.’ She pressed the tissues to the corner of each eye. ‘Now though, I cannot be so sure… ’

They were approaching the turnoff and Thorne told her that he would pull over as soon as they had left the motorway. That the car behind would take her back to her eldest son.

She shook her head. ‘I want to go with you. I want to see the place.’

Thorne looked at her.

‘I never visited him,’ she said, quietly. ‘I could not do it. I made food for him and sent it along with Javed, but I did not want to see him in there.’

‘I understand,’ Thorne said.

‘Do you?’

Thorne’s mother came suddenly into his mind. It was, as always, a pleasant surprise, for even though she was always lurking somewhere, it was Jim and not Maureen whose ghost usually shouted the loudest, who demanded the lion’s share of headspace. That made sense of course. After all, had it not been for Thorne, his father would not be a ghost at all.

He remembered them coming home from some party or other. The key in the door as they and another couple arrived back, shushing and giggling, the goodbyes as the babysitter left and then the music starting. She crept into his room, and he recalled the wine on her breath as she bent to kiss him, the guitars and the voices from downstairs.

‘It’s nice here,’ Nadira said.

They were driving through countryside within a few minutes of leaving the motorway. They passed Chorleywood Common, then turned north across the canal into an area with dense woodland on both sides and carpets of bluebells along the edge of the narrow road.

‘I never thought it would be.’

Unable to sleep, he had crept down in his pyjamas, no more than nine or ten, and she had come out to use the toilet and found him sitting on the stairs. She had brought him into the living room and he had sat between her and his father on the sofa for half an hour while they and their friends talked and drank some more. She had sung along with Patsy Cline and George Jones, singing the words to him, and he had seen his father rolling his eyes, the same way Holland and Kitson did now, and he had never told them that he had got it from her.

Football from the old man and the music from her. Gilzean, Perryman and Jennings from Jim. Hank, Merle and Johnny from Maureen. The beat and the fiddles and the hairs on his neck standing up beneath his pyjama top at the cry of what he would later learn was called the pedal steel.

All those voices and the wine on her breath.

‘You know, as green as this,’ Nadira said. ‘I wasn’t expecting so many trees.’

She did not speak again until they drew within sight of Barndale, but when they did, her expression was enough to tell Thorne that she did not think the view was particularly nice any more.

As the BMW slowed for the security gate, she asked Thorne to pull over and she climbed out as soon as the car had stopped.

The prison had been established on Ministry of Defence land on the site of an old RAF base. The original building had been added to many times over the years, each new block seemingly greyer and more depressing than the last, as though the budgets had not run to anything as flash and fancy as imagination. Acres of brick and metal loomed beyond the barrier, and coils of razor wire ran along the top of the green fence that stretched away in each direction from the main entrance.

Nadira stared, unblinking, through the wire. The wind had picked up and was coming hard and noisy across the fields of stubbled corn on either side. When she spoke, Thorne had to lean in close to hear what she was saying.

‘I can’t blame him… ’

She said something else, but Thorne lost it on the wind and it was clear enough that it was meant for no one but herself.

After another minute or so, she turned to Thorne and nodded. She had seen all she needed to see. She turned to walk back towards the waiting squad car, then, after a few steps, she stopped just for a moment and said, ‘I will try and think about what to say to Javed.’

Thorne watched the car turn round and head back towards the motorway, then got back into the BMW and drove up to the checkpoint. He was quickly waved through and directed towards the visitors’ car park, but parked in one of the staff places instead, because it was slightly closer and because he felt like it.

Then he walked towards the building where Amin Akhtar had died.

Roger Bracewell, the governor, was younger than Thorne had been expecting, floppy-haired and well spoken. Hugh Grant with trendy spectacles. He pushed a collection of files across the desk, bound with a thick elastic band and labelled.

A name, date of birth, prisoner number.

‘This is everything on Amin Akhtar,’ he said. ‘Admission papers, progress reports, course assessments and so on.’ He sat back from his desk. ‘I was asked to get everything together in a hurry, so… ’ He waited, as if expecting thanks or explanation, but none was forthcoming. ‘Nobody’s seen fit to let me know the reason for all the rush, but ours is not to question why, I suppose.’

Thorne lifted the files from the desk and dropped them on the floor by the side of his chair. ‘We’re investigating Amin Akhtar’s death,’ he said. ‘ Re -investigating.’ He saw no reason to explain anything to Bracewell. He did not want anyone he would be talking to at Barndale knowing what his agenda might be, besides which they would all know soon enough, when they switched on a television or opened the evening paper.

‘Right,’ Bracewell said.

The governor’s office lay at the far end of a warren of interconnected offices in the prison’s administration block. With modern furniture and venetian blinds at the windows, it was rather less imposing than some Thorne had visited. There were no antique clocks or dusty paintings of hunting scenes on the wall. There was no portrait of the Queen.