Girl On Fire

20

The season was turning.

The days were growing longer and school was winding down for the long summer break. They were watching films in class and clearing their desks. These were the sunny days when Scout came home with sheaves of paintings, poems and stories – ‘My work this year,’ she would say, dumping it into my arms – carried proudly inside her plain black Kipling City Pack, size small. A big girl’s bag.

Scout’s school uniform, the blue-and-white gingham dress the girls wore from Easter, still fit her but now it was stained with smudges of paint and grass and ketchup and Cornetto and almost ready to be retired. She would need a new, bigger dress for next year.

And when I took her to school and we stood at the gates, working out the day’s schedule with Stan jumping up between us, frantic with farewells, I was struck by the same sweet summer’s thought.

We made it through another year.

‘What’s the plan for the day?’ I said, knowing she had it committed to memory.

‘Mrs Murphy’s picking me up with Stan after school,’ she said. ‘I can’t go home with Mia today but I can at the weekend. You’re going to be late from work but not too late.’ She looked at me with her solemn brown eyes. ‘After dinner but before bedtime, right?’

‘Right.’

‘You’ll read me Poems for Eight-Year-Olds?’

I spread my hands. ‘But I don’t know any eight-year-olds, Scout.’

She was outraged. ‘Nearly!’

I leaned down and she lightly pressed her mouth on the side of my face.

All those parents saying goodbye to their children, and all of those kids wanting to grow up fast, all wishing their childhood away, and yet my daughter would still give me a goodbye peck. I knew that would change one day. But not for a while, I hoped.

I watched Scout until she disappeared into school. Parents dressed for the office and the gym drifted back to their cars. A bell rang from deep inside the school building, and that was when I saw her.

Anne was sitting across from the school gates in something large and expensive. A new model Range Rover. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses but the curve of her face could not belong to anyone else on the planet, with the exception of our daughter.

If Anne saw me she gave no sign.

If she felt any emotion, then it did not show.

But as I watched Anne gun the Range Rover and drive away, a touch too fast in those streets full of children, I knew with all my heart that I had been wrong about why my ex-wife wanted Scout back in her life.

It is more than guilt, I thought.

It is much more than guilt.

A crime reporter of my acquaintance was waiting at the gates of the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road.

‘Max,’ she said. ‘Scarlet Bush of the Daily Post. Long time no see. Long time no quote. Maybe not long enough for you, ha ha.’

An unkempt young man was with her. He had a camera slung around his neck. I frowned at him as he took my picture.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

He did it again. I stared at him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, lowering his camera.

‘Hello, Scarlet,’ I said. ‘The Daily Post? I thought that rag had closed down.’

She stiffened with professional pride.

‘The Post is digital only these days, Max. There’s no print edition, but you can still find us online. These are difficult times for the newspaper industry. Advertising revenue has fallen off a cliff. So I need you to help me out. I’m writing a piece into what’s happened in this city this summer. All of it. The drone bringing down that Air Ambulance on Lake Meadows. The raid on Borodino Street. The death of the Khan brothers and Alice Stone. Now the murder of the father – the old bus driver. Where’s it going to end?’

Give it five hundred years or so, I thought.

‘This Special Firearms Officer who died in Leman Street – Raymond Vann? Was Vann’s death a suicide or accident?’

‘We have to wait for the coroner’s report.’

‘Throw me a bone here, Max. I heard you had become friends with the father of the Borodino Street brothers – is that true?’

‘Ahmed Khan was an innocent man. He was as much a victim of his sons as anybody else.’

Scarlet almost smiled. That was good. She liked that.

She was jotting away in a notebook, strange squiggly hieroglyphics that must have been shorthand. Scarlet Bush had all these old-fashioned skills that were slipping into the mists of history. And I saw that being a journalist in the twenty-first century was like being a blacksmith as the first Model-T Ford came over the horizon.

‘You don’t think that Ahmed Khan bears some responsibility for what his sons did?’ Scarlet said, and now I saw that she was wearing a sky-blue ribbon. ‘You don’t think he shares the blame for Lake Meadows? For Alice Stone’s death on Borodino Street?’ She looked up from her notebook. ‘And for the suicide of Raymond Vann?’

‘I blame his sons,’ I said. ‘And I blame the generations of politicians who allowed ghettos to flourish. And I blame the Internet companies – the ones that are taking your newspaper’s advertising revenue – who serve up beheadings of aid workers as if it was family entertainment. And I blame the hate preachers who fill feeble minds with poison. I blame all of them. But Ahmed Khan? I don’t blame him. Arnold was a good man.’

‘Arnold? You called him Arnold? Wow. You really were friends, weren’t you? Can I quote you on all this?’

‘Do what you like,’ I said. ‘Stick it in your digital edition. Nobody’s going to read it.’

She called out to me as I walked through the gates.

‘What about this Bad Moses character? He’s all over social media claiming to have killed your old pal – Arnold. Are you taking Bad Moses seriously? Or is he just another social media nutjob?’

I remembered the Fourth Commandment stained on a floorboard outside the house on Borodino Street, and I thought of the Twitter account that Edie had showed me in the safe house, featuring Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

But I kept walking.

‘Help me out here, Max! For old times’ sake! Was the murder of Ahmed Khan a hate crime, Max?’

I turned to look at her from the top of the steps.

‘Every murder is a hate crime,’ I said.

And then I went inside to look at the dead.

‘The dead talk to us,’ Elsa Olsen said. ‘But they don’t tell us everything.

We were in the Iain West Forensic Suite, Pat Whitestone and Edie Wren and I, shivering in our blue scrubs and hairnets, for it is always just a shade above freezing point in this place of the dead.

Ahmed Khan lay on a stainless steel table.

There was a livid Y-shaped incision on his scrawny torso where Elsa had opened him up with the green-handled gardening shears she favoured for her work.

And there was a dark stab wound at the base of his neck.

Elsa, one of those tall, dark-haired Norwegians who defied national stereotypes, like the woman who wasn’t the blonde one in Abba, indicated the dead man’s legs with a long stainless steel instrument like a conductor’s baton.

We waited for our favourite forensic pathologist to reveal what Ahmed Khan had told her after his sudden death.

‘There was rigor in the legs but only in the legs,’ she said. ‘What that means is there was strenuous muscular activity in the legs immediately before he was killed.’ She paused. ‘Mr Khan was running.’

I thought of the CCTV images of Khan’s last moments.

He had bolted from the tube train but I had taken his urgency to be the impatience of a workingman who was keen to get home after a long shift on a Sunday.

But Elsa was telling us it was more than that.

‘He was running for his life,’ I said. ‘He was terrified.’

‘Khan must have seen someone in that tube carriage,’ Whitestone said. ‘Someone he knew was a threat to his life.’

‘But we’ve got witness statements from a dozen people who were in that tube train,’ Edie said. ‘None of them heard Ahmed Khan being threatened. Nobody saw any threat of violence.’

‘Then it was someone he knew,’ I said. ‘Someone who did not need to say a word because just the sight of him made Ahmed Khan terrified.’

‘No defensive wounds?’ Whitestone said.

Elsa shook her head. ‘When the end came, it came very quickly. He never had time to fight back.’

‘So he saw his killer on the train,’ I said. ‘He ran for his life. The killer caught up with him – my guess is somewhere near the top of the escalators – and stuck the knife in his neck.’

Elsa’s stainless steel rod indicated the mark at the base of Ahmed Khan’s neck.

‘Cause of death was a single wound to the subclavian artery, which as you know is the artery that pumps blood to the arms and neck. If an artery of that size is torn then it’s possible that it can contract and stem the bleeding. But a clean cut of the subclavian artery with a blade that has a razor-sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges will kill you in, oh, five minutes.’

The old scar on my stomach throbbed with pain that may have been psychosomatic but felt real enough to me.

‘I understand you recovered a newly sharpened 26.6-centimetre knife from the crime scene,’ Elsa said. ‘That would do the job.’

‘The fact that it was sticking out of his neck gave us a clue,’ Edie said.

Whitestone shot her a withering look, then turned to me.

‘Someone knew what they were doing,’ she said.

‘Maybe they just got lucky,’ I said.

‘No,’ Whitestone said. ‘They knew exactly what they were doing. You don’t stick a knife in the subclavian artery by accident. Someone wanted him dead.’

‘Time of death you know because he died in your arms, Max,’ Elsa went on. She stared thoughtfully at Ahmed Khan and then, almost as an afterthought. ‘Manner of death was murder,’ she said.

But there were other, ancient scars on Ahmed Khan’s body. What looked like a shallow stab wound on his arm. The mottled scarring of broken glass on his shoulder. Dark tissue on his arms where bones had been broken and never properly healed.

‘He had a lot of old scars,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Elsa said. ‘When did Mr Khan come to this country from Pakistan?’

‘I believe it was the Seventies,’ I said.

Elsa nodded.

‘Souvenirs of a hard life,’ she said.

It was a short walk from the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road to West End Central at 27 Savile Row. We cut across St James’s Park, glorious in the summer sunshine.

TDC Joy Adams was alone in MIR-1.

She looked apologetic.

‘I don’t know if this is anything,’ she said.

‘Show me,’ Whitestone said.

‘It might be nothing,’ she said. ‘Just social media drivel.’

Whitestone stared at her hard and Joy Adams stopped apologising.

‘I found something on Tubecrush,’ she said.

We gathered around her workstation as she scrolled through dozens of images of young men, riding the London underground but dressed for the beach.

‘Look,’ Adams said.

The young man wore cargo shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. He was turned away from the camera but you could see the strength in his body. The broad back, the pumped-up arms, the thick muscles of the legs. His hair was totally shaved at the side and back, but grew out in a tufty crop on top of his head. In the background, in a half-empty carriage, most of his fellow passengers stared at their phones.

But one man slept.

He wore the uniform of a London bus driver.

It was Ahmed Khan, going home, exhausted by the heat, worn out by the day, on a journey to the home that he would never reach.

‘Good work, Joy,’ Whitestone said. ‘This places Ahmed Khan and George Halfpenny in the same tube carriage just before he was murdered.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Are we sure? The sleeping man is Ahmed Khan, all right. But the young guy with his back to the camera? I don’t know if that’s George Halfpenny or some kid with the same haircut. A lot of people have got a haircut like that this summer. Edie?’

‘I don’t know, Max. It could be him.’

‘It fits,’ Whitestone said. ‘Ahmed Khan ran for his life when he saw George Halfpenny following him. Why? Because Khan had seen him on TV. And he knew how much he was hated.’

‘Five million journeys on the underground every day,’ I said. ‘On five hundred trains. And we are going to arrest someone for murder because of a haircut?’

But Whitestone had made up her mind.

And I saw how much she wanted it to be true.