Good as Dead (23 page)

God forbid the commuters should suffer.

As things stood, none of this was her concern, but it soon would be if the whispers about resolving the hostage situation as quickly as possible grew any louder. If Donnelly started to listen. Then it would become Helen Weeks’ concern too.

She dried her face and brushed her hair. She groaned at the amount of grey coming through and determined to get back to the hairdresser’s as soon as she got the chance. She reapplied her lipstick, then stepped out into the school corridor feeling better. Passing one of the classrooms, she glanced in through the small window and saw a black woman talking animatedly to a WPC. The woman saw her and immediately stood up and walked towards the door.

Pascoe swore quietly and braced herself. She knew Denise Mitchell had clocked her, that there was now no possibility of walking quickly away.

The woman was pretty, with flawless skin and hair in cornrows, and she had begun talking before she had opened the door. ‘Look, nobody will tell me what the hell’s going on. I’m going mental stuck in here.’

‘Everybody’s doing everything they can,’ Pascoe said.

‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ Denise said. ‘It feels like everyone’s rushing around with serious faces, but nothing’s actually happening.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Pascoe said. ‘Obviously if there was anything to tell you, I would.’

‘Right.’

‘Honestly.’

‘Even if it was something I really didn’t want to hear?’ The woman’s eyes were suddenly wet. ‘Is that your job or do they give that one to somebody else?’

‘Look, I think perhaps you’d be a lot more comfortable staying elsewhere. Has anybody talked to you about a hotel?’

A nod.

‘Don’t you think that would be a good idea?’

‘I don’t want to go on my own.’

‘What about family?’ Pascoe asked. ‘There must be somebody … ’

‘There’s just Steve.’ Denise reached into the sleeve of her sweater and drew out a used tissue. She lifted it towards her face then stopped and crushed it in her fist.

‘Everybody’s doing everything they can,’ Pascoe said.

‘Yeah, you keep saying that.’

‘Because it’s the truth.’

‘Really?’ The woman narrowed her eyes and stared at the Met Police badge on the lanyard around Pascoe’s neck. The WPC had appeared behind her in the doorway. ‘What are
you
doing?’

Pascoe wondered if there was anything she could say that would make this woman feel better.
I’m the one being paid to negotiate with the man who has your husband. I’m the one whose job it is to keep him alive.

Denise Mitchell did not bother waiting for an answer. ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘Steve hasn’t done anything.’ Her voice cracked as she raised it. ‘You should stop talking about it and get him out of there, because he hasn’t
done
anything.’

Now, Pascoe really had nothing to say.

She watched as the WPC guided the woman back into the room, then turned and walked back towards the hall.

THIRTY-TWO

‘You don’t appear to be with us today, Mr Jaffer … ’

Rahim looked up and stared at his tutor. She waited, as though expecting an explanation for his lack of attention or perhaps a précis of the topic she and the other students had been discussing for the previous few minutes. All Rahim could do was mumble an apology, feeling the blood rush to his cheeks while some of the others around the table laughed and shook their heads. The woman began talking again and Rahim did his best to listen. He scribbled a few notes on a page that was already covered with meaningless doodles, but within a minute or two the pen grew heavy in his hand and the tutor’s words had become no more than background burble and hiss.

So rack that fucking big brain of yours …

Thorne’s words were still ringing loud and clear though, the expression on the policeman’s face vivid enough to tighten the cold and slippery knot in Rahim’s guts whenever he closed his eyes.

I’m betting he had more than one secret.

He was squeezing the pen so tightly that purplish half-moons of blood had formed beneath his fingernails. He cast his eyes in the direction of his tutor and told his head to nod, while he tried to regulate his breathing. To keep the anger in check. He was not a child any more, and he hated being made to feel like one. He resented feeling ashamed and fearful when he had left shame and fear behind him, locked away back in his parents’ house with the ugly carpets and the stink of patchouli.

The other students laughed suddenly. One of his tutor’s bad jokes.

He laughed along, while he sat there and told himself that none of this was his fault. Not what Amin’s stupid father was doing and not what had happened to Amin. He could never have foreseen that, or done anything to stop it, and nothing he could do or say now would change the fact that he was dead, would it?

Dead was dead, even if there was no need to rack that big brain of his. Even though he knew exactly what Thorne was after. Dead was dead, whatever his parents and their priests might have taught him, and did it really make any difference to anyone except one policeman and a crazy old newsagent how it happened?

Or why?

He was your friend …

Rahim looked up at the mention of his name. Saw the look of concern on his tutor’s face.

‘Perhaps you should go home,’ she said. ‘You really don’t look well.’

He did not need a second invitation. He stood and gathered his books, said something about a virus and hurried from the room without bothering to close the door behind him.

He was lucky that the toilet was only a few steps away.

Ten seconds later his books and papers lay scattered on the floor of the cubicle, as he dropped to his knees, clutched at the edge of the bowl and threw up.

Excited as he was by developments, Thorne had been at something of a loss as to where he should go after talking to Rahim Jaffer, so he decided to get some lunch. To share it with someone he could at least usefully discuss things with. It would not be the first time he had eaten in a mortuary, enveloped by the sounds and smells of the dead and those who worked on them. Thorne figured there were probably fewer germs around than in the average greasy spoon.

Phil Hendricks shared the small office at Hornsey Mortuary with three other pathologists. In contrast to the state-of-the-art lab and post-mortem suite along the corridor, the room was tired and grimy. Hendricks’ desk was as cluttered as usual with olive-green arch files and folders, the only flashes of bright colour provided by the columns of curling pink Post-it notes around the computer screen and the obligatory ‘Arsenal: Legends of the Seventies’ calendar pinned to the wall above.

This month: Liam Brady with his 1979 FA Cup Winner’s medal.

‘So the kid was gay,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’d more or less worked that out anyway and it’s still not much of a motive.’

‘No?’ Thorne held out the plastic bag containing the selection of sandwiches and snacks he’d picked up from Tesco on the way. Hendricks rummaged around, finally plumped for the ham and cheese and a bottle of apple juice. ‘That was the one I wanted,’ Thorne said.

Hendricks said, ‘Good,’ went back into the bag again and fished out a packet of crisps. ‘OK, so there’s always a few morons who enjoy taking their problems out on people with better fashion sense than them, but as a rule I don’t think gay-bashers tend to be quite so … imaginative.’

‘It’s definitely part of it though.’ Thorne took out his own sandwich, opened a bottle of water. ‘There’s sex involved somewhere.’

‘You’re obsessed, mate.’

‘
Me?
’

Hendricks had taken off his scrubs and was wearing jeans and a tight-fitting white T-shirt. Thorne took a quick inventory of the tattoos on display. There were none he could not recall seeing before, and as his friend usually celebrated each sexual conquest with a trip to the tattoo parlour, this probably meant that he wasn’t getting much action. It was always possible that there was a new tattoo somewhere Thorne couldn’t see it of course, but he doubted it. That would mean that Hendricks was getting his end away and keeping it to himself.

And he never kept it to himself.

‘You thought about blackmail?’ Hendricks asked.

‘All the time,’ Thorne said. ‘Give me a thousand pounds or I’ll go on Facebook and tell all your friends you’re shit in bed.’

Hendricks flashed a sarcastic grin, teeth full of ham and cheese.

‘Yeah, I’ve thought about it,’ Thorne said.

‘He sleeps with someone who’d rather it’s kept quiet, tries to squeeze them for money.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You might want to look at the Muslim angle again.’

‘Why?’

‘They hate poofs even more than people who kill themselves.’ Hendricks took another bite of his sandwich. ‘“When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes.” Muhammad said that, apparently.’ He chewed for a few seconds. ‘I’m clearly not sleeping with the right men.’

They said nothing for a minute or two. Sat and ate and listened to the noises of the mortuary. The distant clanging of freezer cabinets and the squeak of trolley wheels in the corridor outside.

‘This Rahim kid knows more than he’s telling me,’ Thorne said.

‘Sounds like you put the wind up him.’

‘I hope so.’ Thorne aimed his empty water bottle at the metal bin in the corner and missed. ‘I haven’t got time to do things any other way.’

‘How’s that copper in the newsagent’s doing?’

‘Pretty well, I think,’ Thorne said. ‘She’s tougher than they think she is.’ He gathered the plastic packaging and empty crisp packets and shoved them into the plastic bag. ‘It’s that poor sod who works in a bank I feel sorry for. God knows how he’s holding up.’

Thorne walked over and dropped the plastic bag into the bin. When he turned round, Hendricks was looking at him.

‘You spoken to Louise lately?’

Thorne shook his head. ‘You?’

He was not surprised when Hendricks nodded. He and Louise had grown extremely close in the two years she and Thorne were together and theirs was a relationship of gossip, whispers and in-jokes that had often made Thorne stupidly jealous. Had made him feel excluded. There were times when Thorne had resented his best friend coming between himself and Louise, and others, somewhat less comfortable to think about now, when he had felt as though Louise were the one doing the muscling in.

‘How’s she doing?’

‘She’s doing OK,’ Hendricks said. ‘I mean it’s not like you’re any great loss, is it?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘You should call her.’

‘Yeah, well she did accidentally manage to hang on to several of my Emmylou Harris albums.’

‘Seriously,’ Hendricks said.

Thorne nodded and lifted his leather jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Listen, about this drugs thing.’

‘I knew it,’ Hendricks said, mock-offended. ‘There was I thinking you’d just dropped in to have lunch.’

‘A
working
lunch,’ Thorne said.

‘I told you, I’d get on it.’

‘When, Phil?’

‘Look, I just need to find a few hours to get my nose into a couple of books,’ Hendricks said. He nodded towards the computer keyboard. ‘Spend some time on the internet.’

‘Soon as you can, eh?’

Hendricks pointed to the door, the post-mortem suite beyond. ‘Sorry, mate, I’ve been a bit bloody busy. RTA on the Seven Sisters Road yesterday. Multiple fatalities.’

‘They’re not going anywhere,’ Thorne said.

While Kitson brought him up to speed with the day’s developments, Russell Brigstocke – ever the keen amateur magician – sat with a deck of cards, practising fancy cuts and shuffles. He listened intently while Kitson talked him through the interview with Peter Allen, the movement of the cards between his fingers helping him to relax and calm down after the call he had received ten minutes earlier from Martin Dawes’ commanding officer.

‘I just thought we should “touch base” on this Amin Akhtar thing,’ the man had said. That one phrase alone had been enough to tell Brigstocke the kind of pompous tosser he was dealing with. ‘From the sound of it, your DI is doing his level best to discredit the original inquiry, which I think is a real shame. It’s not going to make him very popular and if he’s not careful it’s going to make my team look rather silly.’

‘I think you’ve already made a decent job of that yourselves.’

Now, Brigstocke’s opposite number knew what kind of man
he
was dealing with. ‘Let’s not make this about scoring points,’ he said.

‘Sorry, I must have got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘I’m thinking about the Murder Command London-wide. The Met in general, if it comes to that. Nobody’s going to come out of this well, certainly not once the media get hold of it.’

‘Oh, I think you might come out of it a bit worse than anybody else,’ Brigstocke said. ‘From the sound of it,
your
DI should start thinking about traffic duty.’

‘That’s not exactly helpful.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be.’

‘Look, if you’re not willing to listen, I’m perfectly happy to go over your head.’

‘Fill your boots,’ Brigstocke said. ‘In the meantime I’ll pass your concerns on to DI Thorne, but I think he’s got one or two more important things to worry about at the moment.’

‘OK, well I was hoping you might be reasonable, but—’

‘Really? I thought you were just touching base?’

‘I can see where this bolshy DI of yours gets his attitude from.’

‘Come back and talk to me when you’re a superintendent,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Actually, I’ll still tell you to piss off!’

Kitson had laughed when Brigstocke told her about the call. Said, ‘Tom would be very proud.’

Brigstocke fanned out the cards on the desk in front of him, flipped them and brought the deck back together. ‘So, is he on to something, do you reckon? I mean, I know what’s going on down there is important and I’m happy for you and Dave to go chasing around for him, but you do have other cases.’

‘Difficult to tell,’ Kitson said. ‘He sounds excited, but that might just be panic.’