Osama

FIFTEEN

0600 hours.

Eva walked through the main entrance into Scotland Yard.

As a plainclothes officer it was normal for her to be wearing civvies, but ordinarily that meant something smart. This morning, having thrown on jeans and a sweater when she fled her house, and then spent the remainder of the night shivering in the shelter of the bandstand watching Joe muttering feverishly as he slept, she looked a mess. Her clothes were still damp, and she was in no doubt that she smelled none too fresh. She kept a change of clothes in her office, but until she got there, she’d stick out horribly.

These offices never slept. There was always a selection of mostly male officers, thickset and burly, wearing cheap suits, and with physiques that suggested they’d spent a lot more time behind desks writing reports and drinking sweetened coffee than was good for them. But this was the Yard’s quietest hour. The main shifts wouldn’t change over till 8 a.m. – that was when Eva was officially due in – but the bulk of the night’s work was done and the corridors were largely empty. The security guard at the desk gave her a friendly nod, with perhaps a hint of surprise that she’d arrived at this unusual hour looking so bedraggled, but she was a familiar enough face to walk straight past him and along the corridor that led to the lifts.

Eva knew, of course, that there was CCTV all over the Yard, but she’d never registered just how many cameras there were. She counted three on the short walk to the lifts, and as she ascended to the third floor she pictured herself as a monochrome fish-eye image on a screen somewhere in the bowels of this place. Never before had she felt so watched… It occurred to her that she had been infected with paranoia, and she put from her mind the obvious truth: that the source of the infection was on the run from the police, wanted for the murder of his girlfriend and, by his own admission, messed up in his head.

The lift doors hissed open. Eva turned left. Her office was twenty metres along this corridor on the right. Once she was in there, she figured, she would not be disturbed for an hour at least.

‘Eva?’

The voice, male, had come from behind. Eva stopped and turned slowly. On the other side of the lifts from which she had just emerged was her colleague Frank. She felt sick. They shared an office, but their rotas were normally in sync. She hadn’t expected him to be here.

Frank caught up with her. Unlike most of the men who worked out of the Yard, he was lithe and fit. He looked tired, but had a big smile on his face.

‘Twenty-four hours, then I’m EasyJetting it out of here.’ He started to whistle ‘Viva España’.

‘What?’ Eva asked, confused.

‘Annual leave,’ he said. ‘Flying at midday.’ He gave her a broad grin. ‘Heard about Daniels?’

She shook her head as they continued to walk down the corridor. Daniels, the sleazy colleague whose PNC login Eva had stolen. ‘What about him?’

‘Some lag broke out of Barfield. Turns out Daniels made an unauthorized PNC search on this bloke a few days ago. Commissioner’s spitting feathers. Looks like a suspension and he’s got one of Jacobson’s murder investigation teams knocking on his door. Still, couldn’t happen to a nicer fella, eh?’

He stopped and looked at Eva as though for the first time, noticing her crumpled casual clothes and that she looked rough. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Why the MIT?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘You said the murder investigation team were banging on Daniels’s door. Why? I thought it was just an escaped convict.’

Frank shrugged. ‘Looks like he killed another inmate before he got out. Sounds like a right fucking psycho. Him and Daniels deserve each other. Tell you what – I’ll get us some coffee. Black?’

Eva gave him a weak smile. ‘Great.’

Frank wandered off and she hurried into her room. She felt sick. Joe had said nothing about another inmate. Nothing about…

She drew a deep breath and remembered what he’d supposedly done to Caitlin. The scalpel he’d held in front of her face. The threats he’d made. Had he been lying to her after all? She closed her eyes and saw him, and the look of confused anger on his face when he’d told her all that stuff last night. Bin Laden… assassination attempts… Did she really believe him, or was she just trying to?

‘No,’ she muttered to herself.

She reminded herself of the figure approaching her house just moments before they’d escaped it. It was a chilling memory, and it told her that something weird was going on, even if she didn’t know what.

Eva turned and headed back to the door just as Frank entered carrying two polystyrene cups. They collided, and coffee sloshed over Frank’s suit. ‘Oh my God… sorry… sorry…’ But she didn’t stop to help him. She just wished he would go, so that she could change her own clothes. But it was clear he wasn’t going to and she gave up on that idea. A few seconds later she was back out in the corridor and running back towards the lift.

The offices of Scotland Yard’s Homicide Command Unit were on the first floor. Ordinarily they had just a skeleton staff during the night, but it was immediately clear to Eva, as she walked along the corridors, that at least one MIT was active. She counted about fifteen people in the first incident room she passed, all of them looking busy.

Eva stepped inside the room. It was ten metres square and its tinted-glass windows looked down on the Yard’s main entrance. There was the constant noise of muted telephone rings, the tapping of keyboards, the chuntering of a photocopy machine. The room smelled of warm printers and coffee. Eva was a familiar enough face here, but nobody even acknowledged her arrival.

A woman approached from the far side of the room. She was wearing a two-piece suit and her grey hair was very short. For a moment, as the woman looked her shabby clothes up and down, Eva thought she was going to challenge her, but she swerved to Eva’s left and pinned a photograph to a corkboard on the wall adjacent to the door. Eva looked at it and felt her skin prickle. It was an old photo, but it was clearly Joe.

She scanned the room. Frank had mentioned DCI Jacobson, head of one of the MITs. She knew him well – chubby, with brown hair, and always a bit crumpled. Jacobson was one of the few people in this place who didn’t have time for the constant inter-departmental sniping. A good man. She couldn’t make him out in the room. She swallowed hard, then followed the grey-haired woman back to her desk on the far side of the office.

‘Yes?’ The woman sounded impatient and didn’t look up from her screen to talk to Eva. It was clear she felt her personal space was being invaded.

‘Jacobson sent me,’ Eva said, as briskly as she could. ‘I need to cross-check visitors to Barfield over the last week.’

‘First I’ve heard of it.’

Eva gave a half-smile and decided it was better not to volunteer anything. The woman sighed, but rummaged through a pile of papers on her desk until she found a plastic sleeve with a single data stick in it. Without looking at her, she handed it to Eva.

‘Good. Thanks. I’ll, er…’ Eva jerked a thumb over her shoulder, stepping backwards, and smiled. It wasn’t returned.

She walked as casually as possible back to the door, holding her breath, positive that she was going to be called back at any moment. But she wasn’t. Out in the corridor again, she did her best not to run, looking for an empty room with a spare terminal. She found one three doors along, and within seconds she was sitting in front of the screen, plugging in the data stick.

The information was divided into folders, one for each day over the past two weeks. She opened a file marked ‘08_05_11’, to be presented with a list of twenty thumbnail images. Her own photograph was third in the list. For a moment she considered deleting it, but she knew that would be stupid, and she hurried on.

The image she was looking for was two places from the bottom. She double-clicked on it, and a larger window appeared with the grainy but familiar face of a man of Middle Eastern appearance staring out at her. Dark skin. Hooked nose. And underneath the picture, a scan of his hand print, the time he checked in and the time he checked out.

His name: Sarmed Ashe.

Her heart was thumping. She closed the window on the screen and removed the data stick, then went to the door. She was about to step into the corridor when she saw the portly frame of DCI Jacobson walk past.

She cursed under her breath and moved to the side of the door, pressing her back against the wall. How long had it taken her to get here from the incident room? Fifteen seconds? She hadn’t exactly been paying attention. She counted to twenty before taking another deep breath, opening the door and leaving the room.

There was no one in sight.

She walked briskly, but not so fast as to attract attention. As she passed the incident room her eyes darted through the interior window. Jacobson was talking to the woman with the short grey hair. Impossible to tell what she was saying. But easy to guess. Ten metres to the lift. She picked up her pace, feeling like she had half the Met following her. On reaching the lift she pressed the down button and waited.

Movement further down the corridor. The door to the incident room opened. Three seconds later the lift hissed open. Eva glanced to her right. Jacobson had emerged into the corridor and was staring in her direction. Was she paranoid, or did he look suspicious? She saw him mouthing the word ‘Eva?’ just as she stepped into the lift and slammed the button for the basement.

Safely inside, she found herself almost hyperventilating and felt trickles of sweat all over her body. This wasn’t just a sacking offence, it was a prosecution offence. And all to help a man accused of murder?

The basement was the lair of the forensic teams. Like nearly everywhere else in the building, it was pretty much empty at this hour. She passed a pale-faced young man in his early twenties who barely seemed to notice her, but apart from that she met no one until she stepped into the badly lit room of the fingerprint department.

Two young men were on duty. Neither looked like he saw much daylight and only one looked up when Eva entered. Eva forced her face into an expression of confidence and marched up to him. ‘DI Buckley,’ she said. ‘Can you run me a search?’

‘ID?’ the young man asked.

Eva casually handed over her ID, which the young man barely glanced at – and so he didn’t see that her hand was trembling.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Eva handed him the data stick. ‘Biometric details of prison visitors. There’s a Sarmed Ashe on there. I want to cross-check him with the system.’ The young man shrugged, as if to indicate that this was trivial for someone of his technical ability, and plugged the device into his terminal. Eva helped him navigate to the correct file. As the young man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, she felt her heart hammering in her chest and her eyes kept flickering to the door. She expected Jacobson to step inside any second.

‘Gotcha,’ the young man said finally.

‘What do you have?’

‘Well…’ said the fingerprint technician, relaxing a little, clearly enjoying his moment in the sun. ‘You’re lucky we’ve got him, to be honest. It’s only because he had a break-in back in 2008. SOCOs dusted him off just to eliminate his prints from the crime scene. Clean as a whistle otherwise. But what did he say his name was?’

‘Sarmed Ashe,’ Eva breathed.

‘Tch tch tch…’ tutted the technician, nodding. ‘Giving false ID to a prison officer. Naughty boy. ’Fraid that’s not his real name.’

‘What is?’

‘He’s actually called Hussein Al-Samara. Let’s have a look. Iraqi born. Granted political asylum 9 November 2001 – that’s, like, nearly two months to the day after 9/11, right?’

‘Right,’ Eva breathed.

‘Naturalized 15 December 2006… I suppose you want his address?’

Eva tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Print it out for me, would you?’

Ten minutes later, and clutching a single piece of paper, she was once more nodding at the security guy at ground-floor reception, before striding out of the Yard and wondering to herself whether she would ever set foot in that place again.

0700 hours.

Joe was wearing black jeans, a tight grey polo neck, a black woollen hat and a thick, checked lumberjack shirt. It had taken him two hours to find a charity shop where someone had left a black plastic bag of donated clothes in the doorway. These were the best-fitting, and warmest, items he could find. But anything was better than the dirty prison uniform that he had rolled into a bundle and chucked into a big metal catering dustbin at the back of an Indian restaurant on Tooting High Street. With one of the £50 notes he’d taken from Eva’s place, he’d bought himself hot, sweet tea and two platefuls of shepherd’s pie from an all-night café. It tasted disgusting – even the food in Barfield had been better than this – but he needed fuel and he wolfed it down. Just to get hot food inside him felt fantastic.

On the other side of the road was another all-night establishment. Posters in the window advertised the ability to wire money to any country in minutes, cheap phone calls to Nigeria and Delhi and internet access at £1 for twenty minutes. Three men – Turkish? he wondered – loitered by a counter, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from tiny cups. A fourth man, slightly older, stood behind it. They’d gone silent as Joe entered, and given him an unfriendly stare. He had just pointed at one of the computer screens, received a nod from the man behind the counter, and taken a seat. It took him five minutes to set up the Hotmail accounts using a false name and address. As soon as he was done, he’d walked up to the counter and handed over a fifty-pound note. The proprietor had taken it into a back room to get change while the three men moved over to a nearby table to continue their conversation in their own language, leaving their cigarette packets, keys and smartphones in plain view.

Joe’s plan was executed almost as quickly as it was formulated. He had surreptitiously removed the smartphone from the middle pile as he leaned over it, depositing it in the left-hand pocket of his lumberjack shirt. Seconds later the man had reappeared with his change. Joe had grunted a word of thanks, left the shop and hurried down the road before his act was discovered. Once he had turned off the main road, he’d switched off the phone and removed the battery. A mobile, he knew, was as good as a tracking device. But if anyone was going to track him, it needed to be on his terms…

The first Tube to Waterloo had left Tooting Broadway at 5.53 a.m. He bought himself a tin of Tennent’s Super from a local Spar, poured half of it away and sat at the end of the Northern Line carriage, head bowed, eyes half closed but still alert, the beer can that instantly marked him out as a wino to be avoided held lightly between his knees. As he’d hoped, the few bleary-eyed commuters on the carriage kept their distance and avoided eye contact. There are ways of being invisible, Joe understood. This was one.

Joe’s carriage on the train from Waterloo to Epsom was almost empty. Few people travelled out of London at this hour. He stared through the window, watching the suburban gardens whizz past… allotments… high streets… , churches. So much normality. It felt alien to him. A copy of the Metro freesheet was on the floor by his feet. He picked it up and opened a page at random. He stared blankly at the drawing that took up half a page for a good five seconds before he realized what he was looking at: an artist’s impression of the compound in Abbottabad, with images of crashed helicopters and arrows representing troop movements. In a sudden fit of anger he screwed the paper up and threw it back onto the floor. He figured that the world would suddenly be full of experts on what had happened that night.

He stepped out of the train at Epsom just as the Tannoy announced the arrival of the 08.32 to Waterloo. The platform was busy, but Joe’s can of lager did the trick as the harried commuters walking in the opposite direction separated to let him pass. Minutes later he was walking south through the residential area of Epsom. He knew his route. He had walked it often enough with Caitlin and Conor. His father-in-law, or whatever you wanted to call him, lived alone in a quiet road ten minutes’ walk from the station. But he knew something was wrong before he’d even walked for half that time.

These streets were always lined with parked cars, but they were seldom busy. This morning they were gridlocked. Drivers were performing tight three-point turns to get out of the solid, unmoving traffic, which only made matters worse. Several had got out of their cars and were looking ahead, trying to see the cause of the blockage.

Joe, though, realized what it was the moment he turned left into Mr O’Donnell’s street.

There were no sirens, just the ominous blue and white flashing of four emergency vehicles – one ambulance, three police – stationed in the middle of the road. They were thirty metres from Joe’s position. Midway between them and him was a police cordon, delineated by a strip of fluorescent tape and with three uniformed officers on duty. Ten metres from the cordon a four-man TV crew had set up a camera in the road and were standing beside it: two smoking, two drinking coffee, looking bored and clearly waiting for something newsworthy to happen.

The cordon, the camera crew, the blocked-off street: these were the cause of the traffic jam. They were also the cause of Joe’s sudden nausea. He didn’t even need to check that the emergency vehicles were positioned outside Caitlin’s father’s house.

It was all he could do to resist the urge simply to barge through the cordon. What the fuck had happened? Conor? Was he…

Suddenly his pulse was racing, his breath short. If he’d lost Conor, he’d lost everything. He ran towards the camera crew. Before he knew what had happened, the camera itself was lying smashed on the ground and he had grabbed one of the team by the front of his coat and was bellowing: ‘What’s happening here? What the fuck’s going on?’

He felt arms behind him – the rest of the crew were pulling him away. He made short work of them, jabbing one in the chest with the heel of his right hand, swiping another away with his arm like he was barely there. It didn’t matter that they’d done nothing. Rage was burning inside him like he’d never known it.

From the edge of his vision, he was aware of two police officers – one male, one female – sprinting towards him from the cordon. The male officer was shouting something – in his confused state, he couldn’t tell what – and the woman was talking into the radio attached to her uniform.

He stared at them for a second, breathless, teeth clenched.

And then he ran.

There was more shouting behind him. Someone was making chase. Joe hurtled round the corner of the street, running blindly but with all the speed he could muster. Sweat poured from him. His muscles burned. He didn’t know where he was heading. He just had to get away, out of sight. He had no thought for himself, but only for Conor. He had to know what had happened. He had to speak to Eva. She would be able to find out…

He was in an alleyway behind a terrace of Victorian houses. He didn’t know how he’d got there. It was quiet. A bold urban fox stared at him from ten metres away, but apart from that he was alone, standing by three green wheelie bins overflowing with stinking rubbish bags. He crouched down between two of them, making sure he was fully out of sight in case anyone should appear at either end of the alley. With trembling, fumbling hands he removed the stolen phone from his lumberjack shirt, replaced the battery and switched it on.

Ten seconds passed. The screen lit up with an animated Nokia logo. The service bars were half full, the data coverage good. He quickly opened the browser and directed it to the Hotmail homepage. After pulling out the scrap of paper with the email addresses he’d created, his calloused fingers tapped in the details on the touchscreen. In an instant he was staring at two emails in his inbox: one welcoming him to Hotmail, the other from the second address he had created. From Eva.

He tapped it and read the message that appeared: ‘The visitor’s name is Hussein Al-Samara. Address: Flat B, 23 Wimborne Road, Dagenham. There’s a cafe directly opposite. I’m there now. E’.

Joe could feel the return of the anger that had just made him lose control. He didn’t know who this Hussein Al-Samara was, but he knew he wanted to fuck the guy up. And if he knew anything – anything –? about Conor…

Joe acted with sudden clarity. He had stolen this phone for a reason. If someone was searching for him – someone with resources – there was a chance they were monitoring access to his regular email account. If he accessed it from this phone, they could start tracing it. But it would be a moment’s work to leave the handset under the seat of a bus and set his pursuers on a wild goose chase…

He didn’t hesitate. Logging out of his new account, he typed in the username and password of his old one. Ten seconds passed while the connection was made. His inbox appeared.

There was a long list of unread emails. The usual shit: loan offers, porn sites and Viagra. Joe paid no attention to any of them. At the top of the list was an email from an address he did not recognize, but with a subject heading that he certainly did: ‘Conor’.

He felt, as he lightly tapped the screen, that the world had slowed down. It seemed to take an age for the email to display. When it did, and he tapped on the link that formed its only contents, the delay was excruciating.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. A YouTube video appeared on the phone’s screen. No title. Number of views: 0.

Joe tapped the screen to play it. He saw dark, juddery camerawork. A time code read ‘06:03’. There were clunking noises, and then perhaps, very faintly, a whimpering sound.

A child’s voice. Full of fear.

The camera swung round. There was a window. Beyond it, he thought he could make out the sea. The sky was growing light, but there was no sign of the rising sun. It continued to move. He saw a bed. On the wall behind it there was a picture of a sailing ship in stormy seas.

And, sitting on the bed, was his son.

Conor’s face was beaten and bruised. There was a cut on his lower lip, and a daub of blood just below it. His eyes were raw and swollen. His hands were tied behind his back.

He tried to speak, but couldn’t. All that came from his mouth was a weak, shuddering sound. But then he looked up, clearly paying attention to whoever was holding the video camera. Whatever sign that person made, it seemed to fill Conor with more horror.

Finally he spoke. Each word was an effort. He stuttered and stumbled, and it sounded more like weeping than speaking. The message, though, was sufficiently clear.

‘Daddy… I don’t know where I am… Mr… Mr Ashe… He killed granddad… He says he’s going to kill me…’

The very second he had forced these feeble words from his terrified throat, the screen went black. The video was over.

With dread creeping through every cell of his body, Joe stared at the empty screen. And when he tried to replay the scene, he was unable. Instead of his beaten, terrorized son, he saw a brief message: a message that chilled him almost as much as what he had just seen.

‘Video unavailable,’ it said. ‘The owner has removed this content.’

The full cup of coffee on the table in front of Eva was cold, the toast uneaten, the Daily Mirror unread. She had no stomach for either food or news.

She had chosen a seat by the front window. It looked directly onto the pavement and the busy street just off Dagenham Heathway. And on the other side of the road, the black door of number 23. Her eyes were stuck on it. If a lorry or a bus passed – which they did frequently – she had to suppress brief surges of panic. If the mysterious Hussein Al-Samara – or Mr Ashe, or whatever he wanted to call himself – came in or out of the premises, she needed to know about it. Joe would ask her what she had seen when – if – he arrived, and she wanted his approval. Given the events of the last twelve hours, there wasn’t much else that seemed important.

She checked her watch: 09.48. Had Joe read her email? How long should she wait for him to arrive? All day? The café was full and the middle-aged Greek woman who had supplied her coffee and toast was eyeing her from behind the counter, obviously peeved that she was taking up a table that other customers might want.

Her eyes panned up to the first-floor window. Flat B. Was that Al-Samara’s place? The wooden frame looked rotten, the pane was covered with a net curtain. A faint glow suggested that a light was on inside.

‘You finished?’

Eva looked up. The woman from behind the counter was looking down at the uneaten food like it was a personal slight.

‘Yeah…’ she muttered. ‘Thanks…’ Her eyes wandered back to number 23. ‘Um… maybe I’ll have another…’

She’d seen movement in the first-floor window. The net curtain fluttered slightly. She thought maybe she’d seen a shadow passing it.

‘… coffee,’ she breathed. The woman cleared her table.

Eva’s phone rang. She answered it immediately. ‘Joe?’ she said, before remembering that he didn’t even have her number.

‘DI Buckley?’ A voice she half recognized.

‘Who’s this?’ There was a tremor in her voice.

‘Jason Riley, Scotland Yard.’

She didn’t answer.

‘You came to see me this morning? In the basement? It’s about the fingerprint ID I gave you…’

‘What about it?’ she breathed.

‘Well, I was just logging the query and something came up. There were two other male visitors on the day in question and their fingerprint records are all the same.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Identical prints, all of them. Same bloke, this Hussein Al-Samara. Don’t know how they did it, but it looks to me like someone’s been tampering with the records. I’ll need to refer this upwards, but I thought I’d just give you the nod—’

‘Shit!’

Eva let the phone drop from her ear. The fingerprint technician’s words were bad enough, but her view of the first-floor window of number 23 was even worse. The shadow had suddenly reappeared, but this time it had slammed against both the net curtain and the window pane, and a crack had suddenly appeared in the glass. ‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God, Joe – what are you doing?’

She stood up immediately, pushing past the waitress.

‘You haven’t paid!’ the woman shouted. Eva threw a note on the table without even checking what it was, before running out onto the street and straight across the busy road. Within seconds she was at the black door, pressing desperately, repeatedly on the buzzer for Flat B. It made no sound, but she pressed and pressed, thumping on the wooden door with her other hand.

Two minutes passed. Three. There was no response from Flat B. With a howl of frustration, Eva stepped back onto the pavement and cursed, before stepping up to the door once more and pressing the button for Flat A. It was answered within seconds.

‘Police,’ she bellowed into the intercom. ‘Open up.’

There was a clicking sound. Eva pushed the door open and hurtled inside.

She found herself in a square lobby with grey ceramic floor tiles and on one side a row of pigeonholes for mail. There was a door to her left, which opened to reveal a frightened-looking old lady in a dressing gown and hairnet.

‘Flat B?’ Eva demanded.

‘Upstairs…’ The old lady nodded at a staircase with a wrought-iron banister. Eva ran towards it, but then stopped and looked back. ‘Is there a rear entrance to these flats?’

The old lady nodded, but then frowned. ‘Do you have any identification?’

Eva didn’t answer. She ran to the old lady’s door and pushed past her into the ground-floor flat. Ignoring the feeble shouts of protest, she ran along the dark hallway and into the tiny kitchen at the end, where a door looked out onto an alleyway from which an external iron staircase zigzagged up. She yanked the door open – a wailing sound reached her ears from above – and flew up the staircase to the first floor.

It was no surprise to see that the back door of Flat B was swinging open.

The bigger surprise was the baby, no more than three months old, lying in a Moses basket on the kitchen table, screaming its lungs out.

Eva ran past it, heading for the room at the front. She could hear more shouting from in there. Then she saw why.

There were three people in the room. One of them was a woman, short, dumpy, Middle Eastern-looking, wearing a tightly wrapped green headscarf. She was kneeling in the far-left corner of the room, just beyond a tatty sofa, her hands clutched in front of her, her face stained with tears, her eyes full of terror.

The second person was Joe. Eva could never have imagined that a familiar face could look so unfamiliar. His eyes were insane, his lips curled with anger. In his hand was the same scalpel with which he had threatened Eva.

The third person was another man, tall and thin, with dark hair. Like the woman, he was on his knees, and he was sucking in deep breaths, two a second. Eva could not see his face because it was covered by his hands. What she could see, though, was the blood, seeping from behind his fingers.

‘Joe!’

‘Back off, Eva,’ Joe growled, without even turning to look at her. He stepped forward, eating up the two metres that separated him and the man on his knees, then grabbed a clump of his dark hair with one hand and with the other placed the scalpel against his neck. ‘You think I won’t kill you?’ he hissed. ‘I’ll fucking enjoy it. The only way you’ve got any chance at all is to tell me!’ He yanked the man by his hair to his feet, and now he was shouting. ‘Tell me! Where’s my son?’

‘I… do… not… know!’ the man groaned. As he spoke, his hands fell away from his face.

Eva gasped.

It was not the blood that shocked her, flowing from his nose like a torrent, nor the ugly welts that Joe had inflicted on both sides of the man’s face with his fists. Nor was it his helpless expression of panic. It was something else.

‘Joe,’ she whispered.

‘Back off, I said!’ He yanked the man’s head to one side and pressed the edge of blade against the soft flesh of his trembling neck.

‘Joe, no…’

‘You’ve got three seconds. One. Two…’

‘Let him go! That’s not the man I saw! We’ve got the wrong person! That’s not him!’

And as she screamed at Joe, she ran forward and pulled him away, placing herself between her violent friend and the terrified, bleeding, messed-up man he was on the point of butchering.