Mark Billingham - Good as Dead

‘Horrible business,’ Bracewell said. He reached for the mug of coffee that had been brought in soon after Thorne had arrived. ‘Sure I can’t offer you some biscuits or something?’

Thorne said that he was fine. Took a sip of his own coffee.

‘Worst thing that can happen, obviously.’ Bracewell tapped at the edge of the wooden desk. ‘Thankfully we’ve got a pretty good record as far as suicides go, but it’s always a possibility. They’ll always find some way of doing it if they’re determined enough.’

‘Tell me about Amin,’ Thorne said.

Bracewell leaned back again, cradling his mug. ‘Kept himself to himself,’ he said. ‘Studied hard, did as he was asked. Stayed away from trouble.’ He pointed down to the files on the floor. ‘It’s all in there.’

‘I’ll go through them later on.’

‘We run a mentoring scheme here, something I introduced a year or so ago. We team up the more trusted of the older boys with some of the younger ones who look like they might be having a problem adjusting. A buddy system, if you want to call it that. Amin was certainly one of those I would have asked to do some mentoring for me.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Not much point as he was moving on.’

‘Over there?’ Thorne nodded towards the window, the building a hundred yards away on the other side of a large, well-maintained courtyard. Barndale was a split-site prison, with three separate estates whose inmates were divided by age. The Juvenile site, where Amin Akhtar had been held, housed boys between fifteen and eighteen. The population was fed from a Secure Training Unit holding younger boys and itself fed directly on to the Young Offenders Institution for those aged eighteen to twenty-one. The three sites had different governors and management teams, but while each prison was autonomous, key members of staff moved between them on a regular basis and they shared sports facilities, a reception area and a hospital wing.

‘No,’ Bracewell said. ‘He was being transferred.’

‘Where?’

‘He wanted to do an A-level course in Pure Maths, whatever that is, and unfortunately we don’t do an awful lot beyond woodwork here. He’d applied to do the course at a YOI in the East Midlands. Long Minster?’

Thorne shook his head. He didn’t know it. ‘Anyway, I was happy to approve the application despite some stupidly strong opposition from the Youth Justice Board, and he was scheduled to be transferred… some time this month, I think.’

Thorne made a note of it. ‘He was doing well here,’ Bracewell said.

‘And I can’t say that for too many of the boys. He spent almost all his time on our Gold wing, with better rooms and extra privileges and so on, and presuming things had carried on the same way he would probably have been looking at an open prison well before his sentence was up.’ Bracewell smiled and shook his head. ‘Tragically, all speculation now of course.’

‘It’s very helpful.’

‘Is it?’

‘Building up a picture of him, you know?’

The governor nodded and looked at Thorne. ‘Well, I’d certainly have been sorry to see him go.’

‘But you still approved his move?’

‘Because it was the best thing for him, and it was what he wanted.’

‘So why was the Youth Justice Board opposed to it?’

‘Well, I suppose it would have been a little further from his family than he was here, but sometimes these pen-pushers who allocate placements just like to try and make things awkward, if you ask me. I’m sure you’ve met the type.’

Thorne said that he’d met plenty. That it sounded like a detective chief superintendent of his acquaintance. He glanced at the white-board behind Bracewell’s desk. Various headings had been scribbled: Re-offending Rates; Justification for Remand; Age/Offence/Ethnicity. At the bottom of the board, somewhat incongruously, it said, Buy milk, eggs, smoothies.

‘How did he end up in the hospital wing?’ Thorne asked.

Bracewell shrugged. ‘Looked at someone for a few seconds too long. Or someone didn’t like the fact that he was awarded certain privileges for good behaviour. Sometimes these kids don’t need any reason at all.’

‘What happened?’

‘Someone walked into his cell and slashed his face. In and out, no sign of a weapon.’

‘You had a damn good look though.’

‘We followed all the normal search procedures.’

Thorne nodded. The sharpness of the governor’s response had probably been justified. Thorne knew how hard it was to find any weapon, when a boy determined enough could fashion one from almost anything that came to hand.

‘Amin was taken to the local A amp;E to get stitched up, then brought back here the same evening. It’s all in the police report.’

‘I haven’t seen it yet,’ Thorne said. He had already decided that the constraints placed upon him by time might be no bad thing in terms of his investigation. Not having had a chance to look at the notes, he would be unprejudiced by the findings of the original inquiry and would have no choice but to investigate Amin Akhtar’s death as if it had just happened. If he came to the same conclusions as Martin Dawes then so be it, but this way he might just be giving himself the best chance of getting at the truth and that was what Javed Akhtar wanted. ‘Best to start with a clean slate anyway, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Compare what I find out today with what my predecessor found out eight weeks ago.’

Bracewell smiled, knowing. ‘See if anyone changes their story.’

Thorne smiled back. ‘That’s always a possibility.’ He kept his eyes on the governor as he drank the last of his coffee. ‘Any idea who was responsible for the attack on Amin?’

‘A couple of my officers reckon they’ve got a very good idea,’ Bracewell said. ‘But proving it is something else entirely. The boy concerned denied it of course. Amin refused to tell us who it was and it’s very hard to find witnesses in a place like this. I’m sure you know what it’s like.’

‘I’ll need to speak to him,’ Thorne said. ‘Proof or no proof.’

‘Unfortunately, he was released a couple of months ago. Just a few days after the attack on Amin, in fact. Annoying, but without evidence there was nothing we could do to prevent it.’

‘I’ll need a name, then. The address on his release papers.’

Bracewell said that shouldn’t be a problem, but with sufficient hesitation for Thorne to point out that, as far as this inquiry was concerned, the normal procedures did not, could not apply. There was simply no time for niceties, or ethics. Bracewell said he understood, and though Thorne could see that he did not, that the man was still desperate to know the reason for what was happening, he could also see that the situation was making him uneasy.

‘I need to speak to whoever found the body as well.’

‘That was Ian McCarthy,’ Bracewell said. ‘ Dr McCarthy. I think he should be in by now, so I can get one of my officers to take you down there. If that’s OK?’

Thorne thanked him for his help and Bracewell phoned out to make the arrangements. Almost as soon as he had hung up, the phone rang and Bracewell took the call. He said, ‘For Pete’s sake,’ and ‘Right,’ and when the call was finished, he sat back shaking his head as though the weight of the world had just settled on his smartly suited shoulders. ‘One of the boys has smashed his cell up. Seventeen-year-old Polish lad, doesn’t speak a word of bloody English.’

‘Can’t be easy.’

‘It isn’t. My officers are doing their best, but they’ve got their work cut out as it is.’

‘I meant for the boy.’

Thorne remembered the colourful sign he had seen at the entrance to the prison. A single word written in dozens of languages. It was a nice idea, but a shame that the effort at translation had not gone a little further. The inmates probably thought it was a sick joke anyway, considering where they were and what that one word was.