Girl On Fire

11

In any normal broken family it would have been different.

In any normal broken family we would have built on the success of that birthday party.

In any normal broken family there would have been stilted texts, awkward emails, sufficient contact to arrange for Scout to return to the house on the street where it looked as though nothing bad had ever happened, and spend some time with her mother and her mother’s new family.

But we were not a normal broken family and as the days drifted by after the birthday party, there was only silence.

I went downstairs for the mail and flicked through the bills, the restaurant flyers and the charity appeals. But there was nothing from Anne, and as time went by I suspected that there was going to be nothing.

This is what we dealt with, my daughter and I, and we dealt with it every day of our lives.

This is what happens. The absent parent has the very best intentions to put things right. They truly do. But then life gets in the way. There are distractions – other demands, far more urgent – and the child who was left behind is – at best – parked in abeyance and – at worst – forgotten.

Absent fathers do it. But absent mothers do it too.

And the feeling that pierced me as I stood with the takeaway flyers in my hand was sadness stained with anger.

Single mothers know this feeling.

And single fathers know it too.

I wanted more – what? Not love, because you can’t demand love, you can’t force love, you can’t summon it up when it is not there, or it’s buried deep beneath some new life.

I wanted more kindness.

That’s what I wanted from my ex-wife for Scout.

I wanted more kindness for our beautiful daughter.

As I walked back up to our loft, my knee throbbing with a dull rhythm, I noticed that there was one mystery piece of mail, my name and address in elaborate script written with a fountain pen – and I noticed in a moment that it was not written by my ex-wife. Stiff to the touch, but harder than a child’s birthday invite. It was an invitation of a different kind.

The Gane Family

Are sad to announce the passing of

Mrs Elizabeth Mildred Precious Gane On 3 July

A service conducted by Fr Marvin Gane will be held at St Anthony’s Church, Brixton on 17 July at two o’clock

Light refreshments will be served afterwards

At the Muhammad Ali Youth & Leisure Centre

Mrs Gane was the mother of a dead colleague. I remembered her as a tiny, soft-spoken lady who wore hats like the Queen and who had not lost her Jamaican accent after half a century in South London.

Her son, Curtis, had been a Detective Inspector when I first came to Savile Row. On the night that we raided a paedophile ring operating out of an abandoned mansion on The Bishop’s Avenue, Curtis Gane had stepped back on a derelict staircase to avoid a man holding a black carbon lock knife with a four-inch blade and had fallen two storeys, landing on his back and breaking the vertebrae connecting his head to his spine. Curtis never walked again and he never came out of hospital. If he had lived longer, we would have become friends. But there was not enough time for friendship.

The last time I had seen Mrs Gane was on the rooftop of West End Central on the day that one hundred police officers watched in silence as she scattered her son’s ashes to the wind. I felt a stab of sorrow at her passing as I looked at the invitation again. Father Marvin Gane was her other son. I should call him, I thought, as I walked into the loft with the black-edge funeral invitation in one hand and the junk mail in the other.

But then I stared at the TV and forgot all about calling him.

Because something was happening on Borodino Street.

A man with two small children – one in his arms, one holding his hand – was looking at the flowers that filled the street. And I knew immediately that what was left of DS Alice Stone’s family were visiting Borodino Street for the first time.

I had seen the man and the children in images that the media and the well-wishers had harvested from social media. Holiday pictures, wedding photographs, all those stolen moments of happiness that seemed so distant now. The man was older and the children were bigger but it was unmistakably the same family, dumbstruck with grief in a world with a lost wife and mother.

The crowd did not take their eyes from the man as he murmured to the children. The oldest child reached out for a balloon. His tiny sibling smiled in the sunshine. The view cut to the helicopter that seemed to hover permanently above Borodino Street and I saw, at the end of the street, George Halfpenny’s empty rickshaw.

And then the TV image of silent mourning was replaced by scenes of chaos. A red strapline was running across the bottom of the screen:

BBC BREAKING NEWS: FATHER OF TERRORIST

BROTHERS RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGE

Outside the blue-etched concrete block of Paddington Green Police Station, an excited pack of photographers and reporters hemmed in the diffident figure of Ahmed ‘Arnold’ Khan, and were leaning across a pair of beefy uniformed officers to bark questions in his face. Khan was still in the London Transport uniform he had been wearing in the holding cell of West End Central and he looked even thinner after his time in custody.

‘This is coming to you from Paddington Green Police Station,’ the presenter murmured as the screen filled with a ruck of bodies and noise, cameramen and reporters cursing each other as they jostled for position. ‘We apologise for some of the industrial language but this is coming to you live,’ said the presenter, as if that explained everything. He added a warning that ‘this report does contain flashing lights’.

When a semblance of order had been restored, I saw that DC Edie Wren and TDC Joy Adams were standing just behind the officers protecting Ahmed Khan.

In front of him was a dapper-looking man in his fifties with a great mane of swept-back silver hair. I recognised him immediately as Sir Ludo Mount – Queen’s Counsel, media star, the Elvis of human rights lawyers.

Sir Ludo began to speak in his booming upper-class tones, a voice that was accustomed to being heard and obeyed, and the baying mob of hacks and paps fell into a disgruntled silence.

‘My client, Mr Khan, has suffered a travesty of justice,’ Sir Ludo intoned. ‘You do not lose your human rights because your children have allegedly committed a crime. You do not forsake your human dignity because of innocent contact.’

The reporters burst into voice.

‘Are you claiming that the Khan brothers didn’t—’

Sir Ludo silenced them like a schoolmaster from another age with a blaze of fire in his eyes and steel in his voice and the hint of a damn good thrashing in his study after double games.

‘My client has been grotesquely mistreated by the Metropolitan Police, the right-wing gutter press and – indeed – this country. Mr Khan is an innocent man and today the Metropolitan Police have at last conceded his innocence.’ Mount paused dramatically. ‘But this is not the end of his fight for justice. It is only the beginning. I want a total reappraisal of the way firearms are used in this country. I want a formal apology from the Metropolitan Police. And pending the verdict of the IPCC, I wish to bring a civil case against Detective Constable Raymond Vann. Good day.’

As if he were the king of London, Sir Ludo Mount gave an imperceptible nod to one of the uniformed policemen and the sweating coppers used their bulk to create a path through the pack of reporters.

Sir Ludo followed them and everyone else followed him in single file, Ahmed Khan, Edie and Joy Adams, a terrified-looking young woman who I saw was the same Family Liaison Officer who had been with Mrs Khan and Layla, and finally some more big uniformed officers bringing up the rear.

And all the while Sir Ludo had been addressing the media with Ahmed Khan blinking nervously at his side, there were two panels in the corner of the TV screen, one of them showing the scene in Borodino Street where a bereaved husband and two small children who had lost their mother were looking at the flowers, and the other, shot from a news helicopter, showing the great black scar of Lake Meadows blighting a large area of West London. It did not look like a crime scene today. It looked like a mass grave.

Jackson Rose called me.

‘Are you seeing all this?’ he said. ‘Ahmed Khan? Alice Stone’s family? Lake Meadows? And this tank-chasing lawyer?’

‘I see it.’

‘Your mob are going to be looking after the old man while this slick brief keeps shouting about human rights and compensation and the flowers for the dead keep piling up.’ A pause. ‘You’re going to be the most hated man in the country, Max.’

‘What do you reckon, Jackson? Should I transfer to traffic duty?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But you should learn how to shoot.’