Mark Billingham: Good as Dead

‘Look, you know as much as I do,’ Brigstocke said, brandishing the scrap of paper. ‘I’ll try and find out as much as I can while you’re on your way down there.’

‘Can I take Holland?’

‘Just go.’

Thorne walked quickly back into the Incident Room, told Detective Sergeant Dave Holland to follow him and took the stairs two at a time down to the car park. He grabbed a magnetic blue light from the boot and tossed it to Holland before they climbed into Thorne’s car.

Holland dropped the light at his feet and reached for the seatbelt. ‘Any chance you might tell me where we’re going?’

Thorne had shared such information as he had by the time the car was pulling out of Becke House and turning towards the north circular.

‘Something different,’ Holland said.

Thorne had to agree, but was not at all sure that ‘different’ was what he needed right now.

With the traffic thickening as they hit Park Lane at the height of the rush hour, Thorne suddenly remembered that Helen Weeks had been pregnant the last time he’d seen her. About to pop, more or less.

She would have a one-year-old by now.

‘Let’s get the blues on,’ he said.

Holland reached down for the light, and plugged one end of its curly lead into the car’s cigarette lighter.

Thorne could imagine Helen Weeks staring at a gun and thinking about her child. He put his foot down, and as Holland leaned out to attach the blue light to the BMW’s roof, Thorne accelerated south towards Victoria and Vauxhall Bridge beyond.

‘This doesn’t sound right,’ Holland said. ‘Why’s Akhtar suddenly losing it now, and why take a hostage?’

It was much the same thing Thorne had said to Brigstocke half an hour before. Holland had worked the original manslaughter case too and could clearly sense, as Thorne did, that there was something wrong with the picture.

‘It’s stupid,’ Holland said.

Thorne shrugged. ‘We’d be out of work if people weren’t stupid.’

‘You reckon he still blames you for the sentence?’

Up until the judge’s sentencing, the Akhtar manslaughter case had been run-of-the-mill, even if the exact details of the offence itself had remained a little vague. Amin Akhtar and a friend, aged sixteen and seventeen respectively, had been attacked by a group of three young men, all about the same age as they were, on a street in Islington. One of the attackers – Lee Slater – had been carrying a kitchen knife, and during the melee that had followed, while Amin had been trying to protect his friend, Slater had been fatally stabbed with it.

In an effort to avoid prosecution, the two surviving attackers were naturally keen to distance themselves from their dead friend, but their version of events had differed wildly from the account given by Amin and his friend. There had been snow on the ground that night and they insisted that a harmless exchange of snowballs had simply got out of hand. Denying any direct involvement in the attack, they were at least willing to admit that Slater had been the attacker, but claimed consistently that Amin had been equally aggressive in snatching Slater’s knife when it was dropped and using it to stab Slater to death. This was not of course how Amin and his friend saw things and though theirs was the story that most believed, the conflicting testimonies led to the Crown Prosecution Service deciding it would not be in the public interest to pursue any charges of assault or GBH, despite the injuries to both Asian boys. In the end, they had decided to proceed only with a charge of manslaughter against Amin and it had been one of the easiest cases Thorne had ever had to put together.

With at least some of the evidence pointing towards self-defence and given the defendant’s previously unblemished character, the prosecution had been expecting a sentence of four years or perhaps even less. Nobody had been more astonished than Thorne when Amin Akhtar had been sent down for eight. Or more outraged than the boy’s father.

Though he could still not quite picture the man, the ferocity of his anger had become even clearer. Screaming in Thorne’s face on the steps of the Old Bailey. Shouting over and over again that the law had let him down.

‘It sounds like I’m the one he wants,’ Thorne said. Ahead of him, cars swerved into the bus lane as he tore down South Lambeth Road into Stockwell. ‘Maybe he’s taken Helen Weeks so he can swap one copper for another.’

‘Jesus,’ Holland said.

She would have a one-year-old by now…

Thorne would do it, if that’s what it came to, and he spent the rest of the high-speed journey south thinking about how he would handle things and trying to keep his hands steady on the wheel.

Imagining himself staring at a gun.

Wondering who he would be thinking about.

The road had been sealed off one hundred yards either side of the newsagent’s. Squad cars blocked side streets as well as the main routes in and out, which not only meant disruption for dozens of householders but also for commuters using the mainline station at Tulse Hill and the staff and children at a local junior school, both of which were well within the area that had been cordoned off.

Thorne showed his warrant card and was waved through the cordon. On the pavements either side of him, uniformed officers were ushering residents to safety. Some were still in nightclothes, having been hurriedly evacuated.

He drove slowly down the hill towards the target location.

There were a number of cars and motorbikes parked alongside the small parade of shops. Thorne guessed that most would belong to people who had caught the train into work, though it might now be a while before they could be claimed. He could see a police van and several more squad cars at the bottom of the hill on the far side of the station. He pulled over on the same side of the road as two Armed Response Vehicles and got out of the car.

He stared across at the shop.

The metal shutters were covered in graffiti though only the word PAKI was legible.

There were five or six armed officers standing around the two specially adapted BMWs, and, as Thorne and Holland walked towards them, it was clear from their stance and the almost casual conversations taking place that they had yet to be constructively deployed. With the shutters down there was nothing to take aim at and, with the shop based inside a single-storey unit, there was no possibility that the man inside could be taking aim at them.

They were waiting for orders.

Just before Thorne and Holland reached them, Thorne’s mobile rang.

‘I think I’ve got your “why”,’ Brigstocke said.

‘I’m listening.’

‘Amin Akhtar killed himself in Barndale Young Offenders Institution eight weeks ago. Tom… ’

Holland looked at him, waiting to be told.

Thorne just swore under his breath and carried on walking towards the men with the guns, while Brigstocke gave him the sordid details.

The leader of the CO19 Firearms Unit was a squat and surly individual named Chivers. He pointed Thorne and Holland towards the junior school at the far end of the street opposite, which had been designated as the RVP or Rendezvous Point and was being hurriedly transformed into a temporary Incident Room. Walking away, Thorne was thinking that Chivers had seemed irritated by the situation, bored even. One of those types for whom things were pretty tedious unless they were kicking in a door somewhere and spraying bullets around.

Thorne could only hope for everyone’s sake that, as far as Inspector Chivers was concerned, this particular situation would remain as dull as ditchwater.

There was another gaggle of uniforms at the school gates. Staff and children were still being moved off the premises and, to his left, Thorne could see a small crowd behind the cordon, many angrily demanding to know what was happening. Some would be disgruntled parents, but the majority, he knew, were there for no other reason than to gawp and there would be plenty more of them as the day wore on and word spread.