Good as Dead (6 page)

‘Of course I do,’ Helen said.

He nodded. He seemed pleased, but he was studying her.

It was good that they were talking, Helen knew that. She needed to convince him that she did understand, and more, that she sympathised. She needed him to believe that she was on his side and that they would sort everything out together.

That when this was all over, they would walk out of the shop as friends.

‘What happened to him?’

Akhtar grunted. ‘Well, there is what happened and what they
say
happened and they are two very different things.’

‘What do they say happened?’

‘He was attacked,
again
. He was attacked and later on he took his own life, but I know my son, believe me. It is not true.’

‘Had he been all right, up to then? When you visited him?’

‘He was not happy, of course he wasn’t. We talked about the appeal and all that and we tried to stay in good spirits, but it was clear enough in his face. He would not have been able to stand it in that place for so long.’ He raised a hand, eager to make a point. ‘But that did not mean he would ever do harm to himself, not at all.’

‘Did he have friends in there?’

‘There was one boy he spoke about, but I think he tried to keep to himself as much as possible. He was always quiet, you understand? Always studying, studying, studying.’

‘Sounds like a bright lad,’ Helen said.

‘Yes, yes, very bright, but in my opinion that only makes it worse. It is more frustrating for someone like my son in one of those places. He did not belong there.’

‘When did you see him last?’

Akhtar blinked slowly, remembering. ‘One week before he died. He was cheerful and we talked about his sister’s birthday and what I could buy for her. To give her as a gift from him, you know? He missed her and his elder brother very much …
very
much, and this is another reason I know that he was not responsible for his own death.’ He shook his head, waved the flat of his hand in front of him, the certainty bringing a half-smile to his face. ‘He could never have chosen not to see them again.’

‘Why do you think they say that he did?’ Helen was careful to sound as incredulous as possible. She shook her head, as though the very notion were preposterous.

‘You ask them.’ Akhtar spat the words out. ‘Because they are liars like the police officers and the lawyers from the bloody CPS. Maybe because it is easier and will cause less trouble. Nobody wants to admit that anyone could be killed in a place like that. That such things are allowed to happen.’ He leaned towards her, the anger building again. ‘But they are allowed to happen. They
were
allowed and now Amin will never see his sister get married, will never have the life he was working so hard for.’

He shook his head and bit back whatever was coming next. He reached across to the desktop and moved the gun a few inches closer to him. He leaned back in his chair. ‘Now it is up to your friend Tom Thorne to find out the truth.’

Helen barely knew Thorne, though she had formed a good opinion about him based on how he had behaved during the investigation into Paul’s death the year before. Now, she realised, she was counting on him every bit as much as Akhtar was. Tom Thorne had suddenly become the best friend she had.

‘I know he’ll do his best,’ she said.

*

‘My son is dead,’ Nadira Akhtar said. She spoke quietly and without colour. ‘That’s all, it’s finished.’ She turned her head away and stared out at the concrete blur of the A40 moving past the window.

Thorne accelerated to overtake a white van, gave the driver a good hard look. ‘Javed doesn’t think it’s finished.’

She turned to look at him. ‘My husband is … ’ She waved the thought away and went back to her view.

‘Stupid? Stubborn?’

‘He is not stupid. Never that.’

‘What he’s doing is stupid,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s beyond stupid.’ He waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. ‘You know what’s going on in the shop?’

She nodded. ‘They told me.’

‘Did you have any idea he was going to do something like this?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You knew he was angry though, right?’

‘Javed has been angry for a long time.’

Barndale was a medium-sized Young Offenders Institution thirty-five miles north-west of London; its location in an area of lush Buckinghamshire countryside a constant source of irritation to the well-heeled residents in the nearby towns of Chorleywood and Amersham. From Javed Akhtar’s shop, Thorne had driven north and crossed the river at Chelsea Bridge. The blue light cleared a path through the traffic into Earls Court and Kensington until he picked up the Westway at White City. Even without the flashing light, it was only ten minutes in the outside lane from there to the M40, then a couple of junctions on the M25 and they would be there. No more than forty minutes all told.

‘Javed doesn’t think that Amin killed himself,’ Thorne said. ‘He wants me to prove it. To find out what happened.’

Nadira laughed derisively. ‘I want to win the lottery, so what?’

‘You’re not holding people at gunpoint until you do though.’

She turned to him. She was ashen. She said, ‘What is it that you want?’

‘You can start by telling me you think he’s wrong. About what happened at Barndale.’

‘My son took his own life,’ she said. She might have been telling Thorne her son’s name or how old he was. A simple statement of fact. ‘He could not cope with what had happened to him. What was happening to him every day. He was not … a hard boy.’

‘So why does your husband believe that he was killed?’

She thought about it for half a minute. ‘It’s easier for him to believe that, perhaps. He likes to think that everyone is lying to him.’ She stretched her legs out, but they still did not reach the end of the footwell. ‘He doesn’t really sleep any more, so there is a lot of time for brooding on things and for foolish ideas to take hold.’

‘What about you?’ Thorne asked.

‘Me, what?’

‘How are you sleeping?’

She gave a small shrug, and smoothed out the material of her sari against her legs. ‘I have some pills. It’s fine.’ She glanced at Thorne. ‘You have to move on.’

Nadira Akhtar sounded fine. She spoke as if she had come to terms with what had happened to her son in a way that her husband had not, but Thorne could sense the anguish beneath the matter-of-fact exterior. He knew this was how couples coped sometimes. How they handled disaster. There was little point in both partners going to pieces and, if one did, the other had to at least maintain the pretence of getting on with things. Hadn’t he and Louise done much the same thing after the miscarriage?

All a front, of course, but one that had served its purpose for a time.

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.

EIGHT

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.