Good as Dead

TWENTY-EIGHT

Thorne asked Donnelly if he could speak to Nadira Akhtar again before he left. Told him that, with luck, she might be able to suggest where he should be going.

‘You think she knows something that will help?’

‘Not a clue,’ Thorne said. ‘But I haven’t got any better ideas.’

‘Listen, wherever you go, make sure you stay in touch, OK?’ The superintendent was walking with him to the classroom that had been set aside as a family liaison area. Donnelly was rather more casually dressed today, in short-sleeved white shirt and black tie. Dispensing with the jacket and hat gave the impression to fellow officers and interested civilians alike that he was mucking in with the rest of his team, rolling up his sleeves. Though it might just have been because he was sweating. ‘And obviously, if you have any communication with Helen Weeks, you let me know straight away.’

‘I have been,’ Thorne said.

‘So what was all that about on the phone?’

‘All what about?’

‘Your message.’

‘You know what it was.’

‘Is it true?’ Donnelly stopped outside the classroom. ‘Do you think he’s right about what happened to his son?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Thorne said. ‘But whether I can prove it and give him what he wants in time is a different question.’

‘He hasn’t given us any kind of time limit.’

‘You heard him just now.’ Thorne nodded back towards the hall. ‘And a certain firearms officer with his cock where his Glock should be is getting decidedly twitchy, if you ask me.’

Donnelly flashed him a warning look as he knocked on the window in the classroom door and beckoned to the WPC inside. He told her that Thorne needed to talk to Mrs Akhtar and the officer stepped out, looking grateful for the chance of some air, or perhaps just a change of company.

The desks had been pushed back against the walls and a few plastic seats set up in a circle in the middle of the room. There was a low table with tea and biscuits. A few magazines were scattered about, but Nadira Akhtar did not look as if she felt much like flicking through Take a Break or OK!

She was sitting on a chair near the window.

Thorne saw the open holdall beneath one of the desks as he carried a chair across to join her. Clothes and a flowery washbag. ‘Did you sleep here last night?’

‘I wanted to,’ she said. ‘The house is empty anyway.’

‘Where’s your son?’

‘He has a family of his own to take care of.’ She looked at Thorne for the first time. ‘He will come back later but I am happier being on my own, to be honest with you. We argue.’

‘About what?’

She waved the question away.

‘Couldn’t your daughter stay with you?’

‘I told her to keep away.’ She shook her head, then tucked a strand of greying hair back beneath her embroidered headscarf. ‘I do not want her to see her father like this. To see how much he is frightening everyone.’ She looked towards the door. ‘To be around all these people who hate him.’

‘Nobody hates him,’ Thorne said. ‘They’re just doing their jobs.’

Nadira turned away and stared out again at the empty playground. A group of uniformed officers was gathered in one corner near a climbing frame, and on the far side it was just possible to see a row of emergency vehicles parked up beyond the tree line: the ARVs, the squad cars, an ambulance.

‘Do you still see Rahim Jaffer?’ Thorne asked.

Something tightened, just momentarily, in Nadira’s face.

The boy who had been with Amin the night of the attack.

The boy he had been trying to defend when he had stabbed Lee Slater to death.

‘He came to Amin’s funeral, of course,’ Nadira said. ‘Lots of his friends came, some I had never even met before.’ She nodded, proud. ‘He had a great many friends.’

‘So what about seeing Rahim?’

‘Not since then, no.’

‘Any particular reason?’

Another small wave of the hand, as though what she were about to say was silly and unimportant. ‘We used to be friendly with his parents, but after what happened there was some… awkwardness. Perhaps they thought we would blame their son. Perhaps because he was free and ours was rotting in that place. So we have not seen them in a while. We sometimes hear about Rahim, but only because one of his cousins still comes into the shop now and again.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He is studying hard, I think.’ Her hands were in her lap, one rubbing at the other as she spoke. ‘At the South Bank University. Accountancy or economics or what have you. He was a very clever boy, same as Amin.’

Thorne thanked her for her time, grateful too that she had not seemed keen to know how things had gone the day before at Barndale. Whether or not she secretly shared any of her husband’s concerns about what had happened to her son, it was obvious that she preferred to remember him simply as a popular and bright boy.

Not one who had died alone and unhappy in prison.

Thorne considered asking Nadira Akhtar there and then if she had known her son was gay. Perhaps she had known – would a mother not always know? – and kept the truth from her husband. He felt sure the time would come when he would have to tell both of them, but in the end he decided that it could wait. Thorne knew that where there was one secret though, there were usually others. That they bred easily. He guessed that Rahim Jaffer had shared the secret of Amin’s sexuality at the very least, so now Thorne had a place to start looking.

‘If you see Rahim,’ Nadira said, ‘please would you be sure to tell him that we never blamed him for anything?’ She had turned to the window again, her eyes closed against the sunlight that was suddenly streaming into the room.

Thorne said that he would, but carrying his chair back to the centre of the classroom, he was thinking about something Nadira had said a few minutes before. About the boy who so many had told him kept himself to himself.

Wondering where he had got all those friends from.