Girl On Fire

4

By the time I got to West End Central an hour later, a crowd was gathering in Savile Row.

Under the big blue lamp outside number 27, a young uniformed officer was keeping a watchful eye. There was a sky-blue ribbon on his jacket pinned just above the patch that said METROPOLITAN POLICE. You were seeing these ribbons everywhere, in memory of those who had died when the helicopter came down. In normal times, any adornment to a Met uniform was strictly against all SOP regulations.

But these were not normal times.

The young copper nodded in recognition and stood aside to let me pass.

I turned back to look at the crowd. They were builders from construction sites and office workers passing by. In hard hats or sharp suits, they were mostly young men. The mood was subdued as they talked quietly among themselves, but their number seemed to be growing by the second.

‘What’s this lot want?’ I said to the young uniform.

He nodded to the glass doors of West End Central.

‘They’ve got one of the drone bastards locked up inside, sir.’

I stared at him.

‘But I just watched them die.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s what I heard, sir.’ He hesitated, and then indicated the crowd. ‘And I think they want to remember the forty-five dead,’ he said. ‘They want to mourn, they want to grieve, but they don’t know where to go. Lake Meadows is still a crime scene.’

‘There are forty-four dead,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘They found another one.’ His eyes flooded with tears and I watched him fight to regain control. ‘A little kid. So it’s forty-five now.’

I lightly touched his arm.

‘Are you all right out here on your lonesome?’

He grinned. ‘As long as they stay like this, sir.’

I rode the lift up to the top floor.

Edie Wren was alone in Major Incident Room One.

‘Hey,’ she said, and handed me a triple espresso from Bar Italia before turning back to the big HDTV.

They were showing Borodino Street, filmed from a news channel helicopter. The street was taped off at either end and the lights of the CSIs surrounded the house, brighter than daylight. The white-suited teams were everywhere.

In the left-hand corner of the screen there was another helicopter shot, a view of Lake Meadows that had become horribly familiar over the last seven days, the shopping centre a charred and blackened scar on the face of the shining city, closed to the public but crowded with bulldozers and cranes and white tents, at once a crime scene and a mass grave.

And in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, there was a blacked-out head and shoulders silhouette.

Edie turned to me. ‘They haven’t told her next of kin yet,’ she said. ‘That’s why they’re not showing her face. They must be trying to reach her husband.’ Edie pushed back her tangled mop of red hair and shook her head with disbelief. ‘I met her once. Alice. DS Alice Stone. When I was in uniform. She was a team leader even then. And she shone, Max. She was like the cool kid at school that everyone wants to be friends with. And she was nice. A decent human being and a real high-flyer.’ Edie looked back at the screen. ‘I think her team were all in love with her.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s her.’

I removed the lid from the Bar Italia carton and bolted down a triple espresso. ‘Thanks.’

‘Must be a bit cold by now but it’s the thought that counts,’ Edie said, holding out her arms. ‘Come here.’

She hugged me awkwardly. I hugged her back, equally awkwardly as she accidentally gave me a gentle headbutt, the embrace of colleagues who liked each other but were working out exactly what that might mean. As far as I knew, she was still seeing her married man. As far as I knew, the creep was still promising to leave his wife.

But it still felt good to hold her.

And I was suddenly bone-tired. I closed my eyes and I could have slept in her arms for somewhere between fifteen minutes and a lifetime. Then I felt her let go of me and step back. When I opened my eyes, Edie was watching me and waiting.

‘What happened on Borodino Street?’ she said.

‘It went wrong from the go,’ I said. ‘From the moment the jump-off van pulled up outside.’

I told her almost everything. I told her about the figure in the niqab coming out of the house and Asad Khan opening fire before we had even got started. I told her what happened on the street. I told her about Alice Stone and Asad Khan dying within seconds of each other. I told her about telling Mr and Mrs Khan and their granddaughter Layla to raise their hands and run.

But I did not tell her about the basement and Adnan Khan on his knees and DC Ray Vann looking at him through the sights of his assault rifle. I didn’t tell her about the single shot in the basement that was still ringing in my ears, or the muzzle blast that was still burned on the back of my retina.

The sounds of the crowd down in Savile Row drifted up through the open windows. I looked at Edie, still not understanding what they were doing here.

‘It’s probably because we’ve got the Khan family, or what’s left of them,’ Edie said. ‘They were brought here after the op. The father and the mother and the girl, Layla, the daughter of the brother who got slotted in Syria. Mrs Khan and the girl are on the second floor with the FLO.’

Family Liaison Officer.

‘And what about Mr Khan?’ I asked.

‘He’s down in the custody suite.’

‘Why have they got him locked up?’ I said.

‘Waiting for CTC,’ Edie said. ‘Then they’re shipping him over to Paddington. That’s why there’s a bit of a mob outside – because we have the old man. It is all very civilised so far, but I think they would quite like to see him hanging from a lamppost. He had three sons and all of them were terrorists. It’s not a good look, is it?’

CTC is Counter Terrorism Command and Paddington is Paddington Green Police Station where almost all terrorists are interrogated. When the news reports that a terrorist suspect is in ‘a central London location’ it means that they are inside Paddington Green. IRA headbangers, failed suicide bombers and graduates from Guantanamo Bay have all graced the cells and interview rooms of Paddington Green. It looks like a budget hotel, if you can imagine a budget hotel with two-inch-thick steel doors.

I thought of the Khans cowering with terror on the floor of the kitchen. I remembered the old man, the old woman and the teenage girl fleeing with their hands in the air. It had not crossed my mind that the old man, Ahmed Khan, was ready to die for jihad.

‘They looked like victims to me, Edie,’ I said. ‘They looked like they’d had innocent contact. They didn’t look like terrorists.’

She shrugged.

‘But the old man must have known, right? Maybe the old lady and the kid had innocent contact. But the father? I mean – he must have known about his sons, Max. I hear the place on Borodino Street was full of drones. Not even hidden. What did he think they were doing with them? Innocent contact means he knew nothing. And how could he have known nothing, Max?’

Maybe she was right. I rubbed my eyes as we rode the lift down to the second floor.

We heard Mrs Khan before we saw her. She was shouting in Urdu and crying her eyes out.

‘Translator?’ I said.

‘On his way,’ said the FLO. ‘Stuck in traffic.’

The FLO was struggling to calm Mrs Khan while the girl, Layla, sat hunched at a desk letting her long black hair fall over her face. Uniformed officers watched the woman and the girl with wary reserve. It is never easy to deal with the relatives of the wicked. They are always tainted by the sins of their family. They are always suspected.

But Edie Wren sat down next to Layla Khan and gently took her hands. The teenage girl gasped with shock at her touch and tried to pull her hands away.

But Edie smiled gently and would not let go.

‘I like your nails,’ Edie said. ‘Layla, is it? I’m Edie. I work here.’ She studied the girl’s nails, which were a garish shade of green. ‘So where did you get them done? They’re really pretty.’

The girl swept her mane of long black hair from her face.

‘I did them myself, didn’t I?’ Layla Khan said, and even as her grandmother continued to shout in Urdu, there was nothing in her voice but the streets of London.

She blinked at Edie with huge brown eyes, as if amazed that small acts of human kindness still existed in the world.