Osama

TEN

It had been a good shift, Eva Buckley thought to herself. Tiring, but good.

She’d been on since midnight, working from her desk in Scotland Yard. Things had been quiet. She’d not been called anywhere or hassled by anyone. For a lowly, overworked DI such as herself, that was unusual. But it had meant she could spend the night dealing with the paperwork that had been piling up over the past couple of weeks. And anyway, she found herself less inclined to put herself on the front line these days. Maybe it was the first sign of growing old. Now she was winding down with a latte and a blueberry muffin in Starbucks at Victoria Station. At least that was the idea. But now the latte was cold, the muffin uneaten, and there was no doubt about it: her day had just taken a turn for the worse.

She read the article in The Times for the third time, grinding her molars absent-mindedly, as was her habit, and then her eyes returned to the picture of the fresh-faced young soldier – slightly blurred and spotted with age – that she recognized so well. ‘Sergeant Joseph Mansfield of 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment is currently assisting the police with their enquiries,’ the report said.

‘Joe?’ she whispered, shaking her head in disbelief.

Eva looked up, seeing but not registering the crowd of Japanese tourists that had just flooded into Starbucks. She was trying to work out when she had last seen him. Ten, eleven years ago? The afternoon of Millennium Eve. It should have been a happier occasion than it was. Her mum and dad, who still lived in Lady Margaret Road, Hounslow, where Eva and Joe had grown up, were having a get-together. All the old faces. Joe had shown up with his Irish girlfriend. She was beautiful and graceful. Everything Eva had hoped she wouldn’t be.

Eva looked back down at the paper. If anyone had asked her, she’d have pretended she couldn’t remember the girl’s name. But she could, of course. How many times had she wondered whether Joe had talked to Caitlin about her? Had he explained that, growing up, he and Eva had been like brother and sister? Had Caitlin ever felt a twinge of jealousy? Had he ever had to explain that he’d never even so much as kissed her on the lips, no matter how much she had wanted him to?

Or had it never come up?

Joe had stayed at the party an hour, then left. Eva had never heard from him again.

She’d thought about him, though. God knows, she’d thought about him. On his birthday – 22 April, she never forgot that. At Christmas. And when she was lonely, and wanted to talk to her childhood friend.

He’d been such a quiet boy, but none of their group took that as a sign of weakness. That was partly because of his dad. Reg Mansfield had a reputation. Now that Eva was in the Job, she knew his type well enough. A bit of door work, always happy to earn a few quid roughing up some poor sod who owed a couple of weeks’ rent or hadn’t paid their bar bill. Brought his work home with him too. Joe’s mum had the bruises on her face to prove it. Sometimes she’d make a go at camouflaging them with a bit of cheap foundation but most of the time she didn’t bother. It was no secret in Lady Margaret Road that Roberta Mansfield’s biggest concern was where her next bottle of vodka was coming from. You didn’t often see her sober, though best not to mention this in front of Joe.

Reg eventually got out of his depth when he found himself caught up in an armed robbery that went wrong. Eva had never got to the bottom of it, mainly because it was something Joe would never talk about. All she knew was that it had been a raid on a post office during which a police officer who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time had taken a hit. Two days on life support and a widow’s pension for his missus. Joe’s dad hadn’t fired the trigger, but that didn’t stop him from receiving a fifteen-stretch. The Scrubs – frankly the best place for him.

Joe couldn’t have been more different from his dad. Eva remembered a time, just a month before that last blag, when they had met at their usual hangout – the old bandstand in the recreation area at the end of Lady Margaret Road. It was wintertime, and Joe’s skin was flushed with anger. He was holding the knuckles of his right hand, and Eva saw that they were bleeding. At first he didn’t want to tell her what had happened, but after a few minutes of cajoling he gave in. His mum had been hitting the bottle. His dad had been hitting her. Joe had stepped in. It was a brave man that muscled up to Reg Mansfield, but Joe had done it and come out best. Eva remembered how she’d looked at him in a different light that night, how she’d realized that he was a teenager with a man’s strength and a man’s determination. Realized that even though he’d grown up in a den of thieves, he knew right from wrong.

She stared back at the article.

Joe knew right from wrong.

It was a surprise to everyone, Eva included, when he joined up at the age of sixteen. With his dad banged up and his mum now a slave to the bottle, nobody really believed he could make anything of his life. But Eva could tell, when he came back for his first home leave, that the life he had chosen was the right one for him. The quiet, steely manner had intensified. When their loudmouth friends in the pub bragged and swaggered, Joe kept quiet. He didn’t feel the need to big himself up. He didn’t feel the need to do anything but watch.

Apart from that one time.

He’d been home for two weeks. Joe, Eva and a few of their mates were drinking in the Hand and Flower, a local pub that turned a blind eye to the fact that they were all under-age. Ashley Bamber had left school to become an apprentice mechanic. He had been sinking pints of lager at twice the rate of any of the other guys, and was growing lairy with it. Joe, as usual, had sat in the corner, quietly watching. Then, just as last orders had been called, Ashley started coming on to Eva. There was nothing friendly and flirty about it: he’d groped her in front of everyone, and said something filthy. For what seemed like the first time that evening, Joe had spoken. ‘Time to go home, Ash.’

Ashley had looked at him over his shoulder. ‘Knob off, Action Man,’ he’d said. ‘Just because you’ve spent the last three months sucking the sergeant major’s dick…’

They’d left then, all of them, embarrassed and awkward. Outside the Hand and Flower, however, Eva had watched as Joe grabbed Ashley by the arm and led him down the side of the pub and into the deserted beer garden. Two minutes later he returned alone. ‘He ever gives you any trouble again, you tell me,’ he said.

She never found out what had happened in that beer garden. Joe wouldn’t tell her. But Ashley never gave her any bother again, and whenever Joe was back home, he stayed away.

It was thanks to Joe that Eva had joined the force. She’d half thought of joining the army like him, but her courage deserted her and she had decided to dedicate herself to a life of policing, thinking – maybe wrongly – that it was the softer option. She’d seen some things in her time. Rubbed shoulders with some nasty bastards who’d done some nasty things. She knew how they ticked. Knew the kind of men, and sometimes women, that they were.

And she knew Joe. Murder Caitlin? Eva no more believed him capable of that than herself. But then war did things to people, or so she’d heard. Maybe the Joe Mansfield she’d grown up with was not the same one who would now be in remand custody, awaiting trial.

She closed the newspaper and pushed the cold coffee away from her, before leaning her head against the back of the banquette and closing her eyes. She felt sick. Maybe it was because she was tired. Or maybe it was because she didn’t know what the hell to do.

Two minutes later she was walking east up Victoria Street. Hundreds of workers from the surrounding area had emerged from their offices in search of an early sandwich. Eva battled against the tide, growing more and more anxious the closer she got to the Yard. By the time she had turned into Broadway and could see the revolving logo fifty metres away, she was out of breath.

Eva worked out of an office on the third floor which she shared with four other colleagues. To her relief it was empty – she hadn’t even thought up an excuse for returning after her shift was over. They shared a single terminal of the Police National Computer, and it was to this terminal that she headed. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard as she sat down, but something stopped her from using her personal login. Every piece of activity on the PNC was logged, and searching for information not directly linked to an ongoing investigation was a sacking offence. But Eva had a workaround. One of her colleagues, a sleazy fat bastard by the name of Daniels, had been hitting on her a few months back. She’d found herself trapped in his office while he sang his own praises, clearly thinking that was how to worm his way into her underwear. He hadn’t realized he’d left his login details in full view on his desk, or that Eva’s memory was far better than his feeble pulling techniques. She’d stashed the login on her phone, never knowing when it would come in useful. Now was the time. She gained access to the database and in less than a minute she had the information she required.

Barfield. That was where they were holding him.

‘Fuck me, Eva. Bit keen, isn’t it?’

Eva immediately shut down the screen she was looking at and spun round in the chair. A young, friendly DI called Frank was walking over to his desk and removing the leather jacket he always wore to motorcycle into work. She and Frank had gone out a couple of times about a year back, once to a film, once for a meal. He’d taken her home on the bike after the second date and hinted that he might come in for coffee. When Eva had said no, he’d taken it fine. No hard feelings. She hadn’t let on that it was the closest she’d ever got to a relationship, and Frank had never mentioned it again. As colleagues, they rubbed along together just fine.

‘Just finished now,’ said Eva, feeling her cheeks flushing. She stood up. ‘I’ll, er… I’ll see you, yeah?’

Frank slung his biker’s jacket over the back of his chair, raised one palm in farewell, and Eva hurried out.

Her heart was thumping as she walked the corridors to the exit, avoiding the eyes of all the Yard employees she passed in the hope that nobody would stop and talk to her. Nobody did. And as she sat on the Tube from Victoria to Green Park, then headed west on the Piccadilly Line, she was almost glad that she couldn’t get a seat. She felt too anxious, too restless to sit.

Eva was sufficiently clued-up on prison regulations to know that a remand prisoner could receive visitors. Normally it was enough just to phone twenty-four hours in advance and she could get away without showing her face in the office, she reckoned. But as she locked herself into her cramped third-floor flat, all IKEA furniture and framed photos of her mum and dad, she found herself doubting the wisdom of making such a call. She knew Joe would be a high-profile, high-risk prisoner. Maybe the rules were different for him. Maybe she’d be causing him more harm than good if she tried to arrange a visit.

All these thoughts spun around in her head as she sat on her futon sofa staring at her phone. It was with a head full of confused misgivings that she finally called directories and requested a number in a quavering voice: ‘HMP Barfield,’ she said. ‘London.’

‘HMP Barfield – that’s the prison?’ asked the operator.

‘Yeah. The prison.’