First Response (38 page)

‘We don’t have to fight for Islam, not in England,’ said Kamran. ‘Here you can be whatever you want to be. Here people aren’t persecuted for their religion.’

‘The fight is a worldwide fight,’ said Chaudhry. ‘We have to support our brothers and sisters no matter where they are.’

‘And what about those countries where women have to cover their faces and are not allowed to drive, where gays are stoned to death and a woman can be beaten for wearing the wrong clothes? You have to support those regimes, do you?’

Chaudhry gripped the plastic bottle so hard that it burst and water spilt over the desk, but he was glaring so intently at Kamran that he didn’t seem to notice. He opened his mouth to speak, then visibly relaxed and sat back in his chair. ‘I want a solicitor,’ he said.

‘You don’t need a solicitor, Mr Chaudhry,’ said Kamran. ‘You haven’t been charged with anything.’

Chaudhry stood up. ‘Then I want to go home. Now.’

Gillard sipped his coffee as he watched Sergeant Barlow interview Tariq Masood. He really wanted a cigarette but it was vital to get all the preliminary interviews conducted as quickly as possible, so his nicotine fix would have to wait.

‘Tell me again how you came to be abducted,’ said Barlow.

‘I’ve told you three times already,’ complained Masood.

‘I just want to make sure you haven’t forgotten something,’ said Barlow. ‘Sometimes the more you tell something, the more details you remember.’

‘There’s nothing to remember,’ said Masood. ‘I was in bed. I thought I heard something. I sat up, went to the bedroom door and someone grabbed me and put something over my face. I passed out and when I woke up I was tied to a chair with a hood over my face.’

‘Did they say anything to you?’

‘In my house? No. I don’t even know how many of them there were.’

‘And this Shahid, the man that threatened you, did you recognise him?’

‘He had a ski mask on. I told you that.’

‘What about his voice? Did you recognise his voice?’

Masood shook his head.

‘Did he sound foreign? Or British?’

‘British, for sure. Bit of a London accent, maybe.’

‘London, are you sure?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not good with accents.’

Barlow made a note on his pad. ‘Young? Old?’

‘Thirty, maybe. Looked like he worked out, you know? He was wearing overalls but I could see he was fit. He spends time in the gym, I’m sure of that.’ He consulted his watch. ‘I want to go home,’ he said. ‘I need to get a shower.’

‘Just a few more questions and then we’ll take you wherever you want to go,’ said Barlow.

‘When that poor man was blown up, I was so sure I was going to die,’ said Mohamed Osman. ‘Shahid killed him without a second thought, as if he was no more than an animal.’ He shuddered. ‘May Allah rest his soul in peace.’

‘And why was this man killed?’ asked Kamran.

‘He said he wouldn’t do what Shahid wanted, sir. Shahid said we had to obey him, and that if we didn’t, we would die too.’

‘What about the trigger you were holding?’

‘Shahid said the trigger would not work, sir. He said the only way the bomb could be detonated was by the phone he carried. Sir, check the bomb for yourself, you will see that I am telling the truth.’

‘Which mosque do you attend, Mohamed?’

‘I do not go to the mosque to pray, sir. I sometimes pray with my family at home.’

‘Why do you not go to the mosque?’

‘It is not our way, sir. And the mosques near us are not for Somalians.’

‘The mosques are for all Muslims,’ said Kamran.

Osman forced a smile. ‘That is what they say, sir. But the Pakistanis at our local mosques do not make us welcome.’

‘And how do you feel about ISIS?’

Osman frowned. ‘How do I feel, sir? What do you mean?’

‘Are you sympathetic to their aims?’

Osman shook his head. ‘Oh, no, sir. I lived in Somalia before I moved to England. I have seen that violence solves nothing.’ He reached up to touch the wicked scar that ran across his left cheek. ‘When I was a child, robbers came to our house. They did this to me to force my father to hand over everything we had. My family came here to escape violence. That is the wonderful thing about England. Here we all live together in peace.’ He grimaced. ‘That is what I thought, anyway. Until today. I did not think that something like this would ever happen to me. Not in England.’ He shuddered again. ‘Do you think you will catch this man, sir? Do you think you will make this Shahid pay for his crimes?’

‘I certainly hope so, Mr Osman.’

Osman nodded enthusiastically. ‘I hope so too, sir. That is one of the great things about this country. There is justice for all.’

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said Gillard, blowing smoke towards the Houses of Parliament. He was standing with Kamran on the terrace outside the canteen. ‘They were all in fear for their lives.’

‘The timeline fits, too,’ said Kamran. ‘Starting with Zach Ahmed and ending with Faisal Chaudhry, they were abducted, fitted with the vests and terrorised. They all tell the same story, pretty much.’

‘Plus they all have the same throwaway mobile phones and typewritten instructions. We’re getting them checked for DNA and prints but I’m guessing that Shahid won’t have left any traces.’ He blew a tight plume of smoke towards the Shard. ‘We need to find out where they were taken to,’ he continued. ‘They all give the same description of the factory or warehouse where they were held. I’m guessing somewhere in south London because that’s where the first drop-offs were. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.’

‘And we have a murder enquiry now,’ said Kamran. ‘How do you want to handle that?’

‘We’ll keep it within SO15 at the moment,’ said Gillard. ‘We’ll need to run a check on all Asian men who went missing over the past forty-eight hours, obviously.’ He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew more smoke towards the Thames. ‘I’m knackered, Mo.’

‘It’s been a long day.’

‘Yeah, we should call it a night. Start fresh in the morning.’

‘What about the men we’re holding?’

‘We have to let them go home,’ said the chief superintendent.

‘It might be helpful to keep them here overnight.’

‘In a perfect world, sure. But we know they were forced to wear those vests. They’re victims in this, and if we start to make it look as if they were anything but victims we run the risk of being seen as heavy-handed. We don’t want anyone alleging that we’re keeping them in custody because they’re Asian men with beards. A couple of them have already tried to play the race card.’ He took another drag on his cigarette. ‘No, we let them go home. But we keep them under observation, for the time being at least. Our main aim now is to find the location of that warehouse, to identify the victim and, of course, to track down Shahid. I don’t understand why he never got back to you.’

‘Maybe something happened that we’re not aware of,’ said Kamran.

Gillard smiled tightly. ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if he got hit by a bus?’

‘There has to be some reason he hasn’t called,’ said Kamran. ‘He’d won. He’d got what he wanted. The prisoners were at the airport. So far as he knew, there was a plane there ready to fly them out. Why didn’t he follow through?’

‘Maybe he realised we were calling his bluff,’ said Gillard. ‘He knew we were about to send in the SAS and that would mean game over. The vests were fake so once we called his bluff he was out of options.’

‘But why didn’t he use real explosives?’ asked Kamran. ‘He obviously had the real thing because he killed the guy in the warehouse. How come that vest was real and the rest weren’t? None of this makes any sense.’

‘Go home and sleep on it,’ said Gillard. ‘I’ll tie things up here and see you first thing. And make sure you keep your mobile with you, just in case Shahid does call back.’ He patted Kamran on the shoulder. ‘You did bloody good work today, Mo. You should be proud.’

Kamran smiled at the compliment, but he wasn’t sure it was merited. He felt that somehow he’d been out-manoeuvred, that Shahid had got exactly what he wanted. The problem was, for the life of him Kamran couldn’t work out what that was.

‘There you go, Mr Ahmed,’ said the female constable in the passenger seat in front of him. ‘I’m sorry about the clothes. You’ll get them back eventually.’

‘That’s okay. I’m just glad to be home,’ said Ahmed. He climbed out of the car. He was holding a small plastic bag containing his wallet, mobile phone, spare change and keys. A woman with several carrier bags stared at him as she walked by, frowning. He knew how strange he looked in the paper suit and paper shoes, but the police had explained they needed all his clothing as evidence.

He let himself into the building and went up the stairs to his second-floor studio flat. Once inside he made himself a mug of tea, then spent the next hour carefully wiping down every surface in the flat, taking particular care to clean every knob, handle and switch he had touched. He used disposable cloths and placed the used ones in a black rubbish bag. When he was satisfied, he stripped off his paper suit, put it with the disposable shoes into the rubbish bag, and went into the cramped bathroom.

He stood in front of the mirror and stared at his reflection for several seconds. He had hated the beard from the start, but it had been necessary. He used a pair of scissors to hack away most of the facial hair then took a can of shaving foam and a Gillette razor and shaved off the rest.

He showered and changed into brand new clothes he’d bought a week earlier. Then he placed all of his old clothes in the black rubbish bags. Also into the bags went anything that identified him as Zach Ahmed. That wasn’t his real name: it was an identity he’d carefully cultivated over the past two years. His real name was Daniel Khan.

He peered out of the window and saw the police car parked across the road. The two officers had bought coffees from one of the all-night cafés and were sipping them as they chatted.

He had a large nylon kitbag under his bed and pushed the rubbish bags into it, then zipped it up. He went around the flat one last time, checking he hadn’t forgotten anything, then headed downstairs. One of the reasons Daniel had rented the flat in Bayswater was that it had a way out through a small backyard where the rubbish bins were stored. He locked the flat and went downstairs, out of the back door to the yard and through a wooden gate into the alley that ran behind the terrace.

He caught a black cab in Queensway and had the driver drop him at Victoria station. He caught a second cab to south London and got out in Peckham. He walked for a good ten minutes with the kitbag, doubling back several times to reassure himself that he wasn’t being followed.

The warehouse had a for-sale sign over its door. It had been on the market for more than two years but planning restrictions meant it was proving difficult to sell. There was a chain-link fence running around it and the surrounding yard. The gate was unlocked and he walked through and around to the rear of the building where there was a delivery bay and a metal shutter that had been raised. He went inside.

The nine chairs were still standing in a circle. Shahid had taken off his ski mask and overalls and was wearing a pink polo shirt and faded blue jeans. He was taking the SIM card out of a phone as Daniel walked in. He grinned. ‘Hello, bruv.’

Daniel dropped his bag and hugged his brother. Adam Khan was three years older than Daniel but they were often mistaken for twins. ‘Did you get the money?’ asked Daniel, as he stepped back.

‘Of course. All five million.’

Daniel punched the air. ‘Fucking ace.’

‘I had it collected and put into the banking system. I’ll move it around a bit but it’s pretty much untraceable already. And you got the recording?’

Daniel pulled his mobile phone out of his back pocket. ‘The quality’s great. You can hear every word.’

‘And the cops didn’t examine it?’

‘They took the other phone but I told them this was my personal one and they let me keep it.’

‘How did the interrogation go?’

‘Piece of cake. But there’s something you need to know. The guy you sent to Tavistock Square? He was a cop.’

Adam’s jaw dropped. ‘No fucking way.’

‘Undercover with the NCA. We thought he was a paedo but he was undercover.’

‘Fuck me, he looked the part.’

Daniel grinned. ‘Any Asian with a beard is a paedo or a jihadist? That’s racial profiling, bruv. But once he told them what had happened here, they had to believe him. And us.’

Adam shook his head. ‘Shit, that’s not good. We went to a lot of trouble making sure they were bad. If not potential jihadists, at least they were criminals.’

‘He was good at his job, that’s for sure,’ said Daniel. ‘He looked as if he was part of that gang.’

‘We were lucky he wasn’t hurt,’ said Adam.

‘The plan was never for anyone to get hurt,’ said Daniel. ‘The only way he’d have got hurt is if the cops had overreacted. But, yeah, we were lucky.’

The two men embraced again. ‘Time to move,’ said Adam. ‘I cleaned up the body.’

Daniel laughed and went to look behind the screen. ‘It worked a fucking treat, didn’t it? They shat themselves.’

‘It looked real, all right,’ said Adam. ‘That bit of leg sticking out of the trainer was the clincher.’

‘Bog-standard special effects,’ said Daniel. ‘Shows you my degree wasn’t a total waste of money.’ He nodded at the kitbag. ‘The stuff in there needs burning.’

‘Put it in the car with the rest of the rubbish.’ He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I’m looking forward to getting back to the real world.’

‘Me too,’ said Daniel.

Kamran’s secretary put a mug of coffee on his desk, with a folder containing mail to be signed. He thanked her, picked up his pen and signed the letters one after another. When he’d finished he looked at the whiteboard on the wall to his right. He had fixed eighteen photographs to it. The top row were the surveillance photographs of the nine men wearing the suicide vests. Below them were the nine hostages. All had now been released and were back home with their families. The hunt for Shahid had been passed onto MI5 and GCHQ as there was virtually nothing that the police could do. They had no description or intel of any sort. All they had was his voice. So far GCHQ hadn’t been able to come up with a match, and neither had their American counterparts, the National Security Agency. It was a mystery, and so far as Kamran could see, it was destined to remain that way.