At the end of a week when the death toll at the Lake Meadows shopping centre crept up to forty-six, and the crowds kept coming to Borodino Street, and the sea of flowers just kept getting bigger, I drove one hour west of the city and I parked the old BMW X5 in a spot where all I could see were green rolling hills with the river running through them, the Thames – and it was still the Thames out here – molten gold in the sunshine of early summer.
I let Stan off the leash and he busied himself nibbling the grass, delicately careful as a rabbit, while I sat on a bench by the towpath and stared upriver. The track leading to Henley-on-Thames had a scattering of joggers, dog walkers and tourists who had strolled out of town. As Stan munched grass – he found it aided his digestion – I watched the river with its sightseeing boats and the sculls of rowers.
After a while I saw them coming down the towpath.
A small woman with fair hair and dark glasses, maybe forty, and a teenage boy, no older than sixteen but a full head and shoulders taller than the woman. But they still looked like mother and son. The boy also wore dark glasses and there was an assistance dog loping at his side, a Labrador-Retriever mix with fur the colour of melted butter.
The woman was Detective Chief Inspector Pat Whitestone, my senior officer and the most experienced homicide cop in West End Central. The boy was her son Justin, who had lost his sight in one of those mindless eruptions of violence that can come out of nowhere in the teenage years.
And the dog was Dasher.
Stan’s nose perked up at the familiar scent of Dasher and he ran off to greet the party and his old friend. Whitestone and Justin greeted him warmly but Dasher, who had been trained to never be distracted from his role, merely gave Stan a quick butt-sniff for form’s sake and then looked up at his master.
‘How’s the holiday?’ I asked them.
Whitestone and Justin were walking the full length of the Thames Path, the national trail that runs for almost two hundred miles from the river’s source deep in the heart of the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier in the East End.
‘Cool,’ Justin said.
‘You should do it with Scout,’ Whitestone said. ‘Best walk in the country.’
Justin walked down to the riverbank with the two dogs, Stan capering with mad glee by the side of the calm, solemn Dasher.
‘Not too close to the water,’ Whitestone called.
‘I can hear it,’ Justin replied, frowning with irritation.
Whitestone and I sat on the bench. We watched her son and our dogs.
‘You can do it in fifteen days but we’re taking three weeks,’ Whitestone said. ‘We had a rest day in Oxford, we’re taking another one here and then one more in Windsor.’
‘Legoland,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to Windsor with Scout.’
‘Justin’s Legoland days are over,’ Whitestone said. ‘How are you, Max?’
We had only briefly spoken on the phone after Lake Meadows, my boss checking in with me from her holiday to let me know – without ever actually saying the words – that she was glad I was alive.
‘The knee’s healing well,’ I said.
Whitestone waited for more.
‘I think about the people I saw after the helicopter came down,’ I said, watching the river. ‘There was a security guard who lost an arm. There was an old lady and her husband lying on the ground. And there was a man – a man in a suit and tie, some kind of executive – carrying a bag from the Apple store and he was covered in this grey dust. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about them and I wonder if they made it out alive. And I wonder if they are awake in the middle of the night, too.’
She nodded with understanding. But there was nothing she could tell me.
‘And was it a bigger network than just the brothers?’
‘It doesn’t look like it. Counter Terrorism haven’t arrested anyone else and they are not charging Ahmed Khan.’
‘The father?’
I nodded. ‘Flashman’s got him banged up in Paddington Green but they’re going to release him in a few days. They’re waiting for a safe house. Apparently there’s a long waiting list for safe houses. And they’re handing him to West End Central.’
‘To us? Why??’
‘To make sure nobody tops him.’
‘You want me to come back early?’
I shook my head.
‘Enjoy your holiday. Finish your walk. I can handle it. But Ahmed Khan doesn’t want to go to a safe house. He wants to go home to Borodino Street.’
‘And Borodino Street is still a crime scene.’
‘But not for much longer. I don’t know how long we can keep him in a safe house if he doesn’t want to be there. The search teams and the CSIs have torn that house apart and there’s still no sign of those two Croatian hand grenades that were meant to be on the premises. There’s nothing left to bag, dust or photograph. There’s nowhere left to search. And there’s nobody standing trial for the murder of Alice Stone because the man who killed her is dead.’
Whitestone thought about it.
‘The old man knew nothing about his sons? Really?’
Like Edie, she was struggling to believe it was a case of innocent contact.
‘He’s a bus driver,’ I said. ‘I know it sounds unlikely that someone could have a terrorist cell on the other side of the breakfast table and know nothing about it. But I believe that’s what happened.’
‘And the old man wants to go back to normal life,’ Whitestone said, shaking her head. She took off her shades. They were prescription sunglasses, and her blue myopic eyes had a vulnerable look as she squinted in the dazzling early morning sunshine. ‘He might find that normal life isn’t there any more,’ she said. ‘Who’s going to be in the safe house with him?’
‘His wife and their granddaughter, if social services haven’t got their claws into the kid. And I need to know what the drill is for the Khan family going home when their house is no longer a crime scene.’
Whitestone shook her head.
‘There is no drill,’ she said. ‘It’s always different with former crime scenes. People die in one place and it gets razed to the ground. Someone gets their head bashed in at some other place and life carries on as if nothing much happened. It all depends if someone wants to live there. Dennis Nilsen’s flat is still in Muswell Hill but Fred and Rose West’s house was bought by the local council and demolished. John Christie’s house at 10 Rillington Place is a garden now but the house where Lord Lucan allegedly topped the nanny is still there in Belgravia. Property value has a lot to do with it. And the body count. Borodino Street in the East End? I don’t know.’
‘Three people died there.’
‘Two of them don’t count. Terrorists – even alleged terrorists – don’t count. But Alice Stone died there, and she has struck a nerve in this country because she gave her life fighting the bastards who were responsible for Lake Meadows.’ Whitestone shrugged. ‘I can’t honestly see how the Khans can go home. Their house is a memorial now. But if Ahmed Khan is not going to be charged with anything, and if the property is in his name, then I don’t see how we can stop him.’
‘Should we give him an Osman warning?’
An Osman warning is a notice issued by a police force to officially warn someone that their life is in danger but that we do not have sufficient evidence to arrest a possible offender.
‘Has anyone made a threat on Khan’s life?’
‘Not that I am aware of, no.’
‘Then the Osman warning can wait until someone threatens to kill the old boy.’
‘I don’t think we’ll have to wait long,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen the crowds on Borodino Street. You’ve seen the strength of feeling about the death of Alice Stone.’
Whitestone nodded.
‘And I share those feelings. When we’re back in town, the first thing I am going to do is take some flowers to Borodino Street.’ She paused, as if trying to understand her need to place some flowers with all those other flowers. ‘Alice was the best of us,’ she said.
We watched the dogs and the boy sitting down at the river’s edge. Another rowing scull went past, seeming to glide on the surface of the river, the tiny coxswain in the stern urging the crew on. Justin raised his head at the sound of their calls.
‘We heard from Scout’s mother,’ I said.
‘What does she want?’ Whitestone said. ‘Don’t tell me. She wants Scout back in her life.’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Guilt,’ Whitestone said. ‘I had the same with Justin’s dad. It hits them every now and again. The absent parent. Terrible guilt. But they get over it remarkably well.’
‘Is that all it is?’ I said. ‘Guilt?’
‘What else would it be?’ Whitestone said.
We stared at the river in silence, two single parents reflecting on the fecklessness of the absent parent and in that moment the fact that we were a man and a woman mattered a lot less than the fact that we were both single parents.
‘Who’s the kid preaching to the crowds in Borodino Street?’ Whitestone said.
So she had seen him too. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
‘Then you better find out,’ my boss said. ‘And keep looking for those grenades.’
‘We’ve been doing nothing else, boss,’ I said.
Knocking on for midnight on Friday in Camden Town, and the creatures of the night were coming out to play.
Some of them were coming out to play for the very first time – the wide-eyed rich kids from the big houses who were just the other side of their exams – and others had been coming out to play in these loud, dark places for ten, twenty or forty years. The man I sought was one of the forty-year men.
Nils looked like a diseased crow.
Thin, beaky, with a spiked-up hairdo that was a tribute to the young Keith Richards. That elaborate hair had stood in proud homage to Keith for four decades, thinned only slightly by time, it was now kept jet black with bottles of After Midnight dye from Boots the Chemist.
Nils strolled on to the stage of a semi-legendary club by the canal and turned his back to the audience, revealing several inches of butt crack as he bent over the electric guitars that waited in their stands.
A few of the audience – that motley Camden Town crew of hungry fresh young faces and drug-raddled party people – smirked and giggled at the bottom reveal as Nils fussed with the tuning of a battered Fender Telecaster.
They stopped laughing when he effortlessly slashed the main riff from ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. His crow face impassive, Nils put the Fender back in its stand and turned his attention to the bass guitar.
Same routine. Bend, butt crack reveal, tune and then play a riff that was so good it was identical to the record. This time it was the bass line to ‘Going to a Go-Go’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.
After tuning the guitars, Nils stood at the side with someone young enough to be his granddaughter. She was wearing a cowboy hat, mini-skirt and cowboy boots. The band slouched on stage to whoops from the crowd. They were around thirty years younger than Nils, closer to the age of the youngest members of the audience, and he watched over them with a slightly bored, paternal air as they picked up their instruments and began their first song.
Then he headed backstage with the girl. I followed them.
The changing room was a windowless cube that was stained with the inane graffiti of half a century. Nils and the girl in the cowboy hat were sitting on a couple of boxes as he chopped out lines of white powder on a cracked CD.
‘Police,’ I told the girl, showing her my warrant card. ‘Time for bed.’
She was gone in a moment, getting out of there so fast she almost lost her cowboy hat.
I stared hard at Nils.
‘How old was she?’ I said.
‘Come on,’ he said, his voice coarsened by half a century of cigarettes, spliffs and goodness knows what. ‘She’s on a gap year, Max. Consenting adults and all that.’ He stared wistfully at the door. ‘Great veins,’ he sighed. ‘The plump blue veins of extreme youth.’
‘You’re not still shooting up, are you?’
‘I stopped,’ he said emphatically. ‘No more needles.’
But I saw that he missed it. They always missed it.
‘Just this now,’ he said, indicating the white lines on the CD. ‘And strictly up the hooter.’
‘And you’re still a roadie,’ I said.
‘Guitar technician. Roadie sounds so derogatory.’
‘We’re looking for that weapons dealer, Nils. Ozymandias.’
‘I thought you might be. Ozymandias is not in his flat on the Elphinstone Estate. Hasn’t been seen for weeks.’
The Elphinstone Estate is the closest my city has to a no-go zone for the law. A semi-derelict collection of flats that were built in the Sixties, property developers had been trying to pull it down for years but some of the residents steadfastly refuse to move out. So do all of the gangs that run their small businesses from the Elphinstone Estate. Nils had been a regular at the Elphinstone’s shooting galleries for decades. He still scored his white powders and puff there, and knew all of the dealers and their clients, which was what made him one of my most valuable Criminal Informants.
‘Yes, Nils. We know Ozymandias is not home. We looked.’
‘Of course you did. Sorry.’
‘And we know his real name. It’s not Ozymandias, is it?’
‘Probably not.’ He indicated the white lines. There was a rolled-up fiver in his hands. He licked his lips. ‘Do you mind if I … ?’
I nodded.
‘I mind,’ I said, picking up the CD case, being careful not to spill the white lines. ‘But we don’t know where he’s gone. And we don’t know if he really sold two Cetinka hand grenades to the Khan brothers. And if he did, we don’t know what happened to them. So we urgently need him to help with our enquiries, Nils. Where the hell is he?’
‘Who knows? He could be fermenting civil war in the Crimea or he could be doing Spice in Ibiza. Ozymandias comes and goes. A free spirit.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘Look – I told you what I heard. One of the little boys on the estate – some pound store gangster who wants to go out in a blaze of glory, just like a rap song – was talking about buying a couple of hand grenades from Ozymandias. Grenades up the ante, right? Better than a gun. Big status in the gangs. He bought a couple – they were the two you dug up from that park. Lucky it was you that found them and not some little kiddy who just wanted a ride on the swings and roundabouts, right? What does this do, Mummy? And someone asked the little pound store gangster who else was serious enough to be in the market for grenades and he said he heard they were bound for a couple of brothers just back from their jihad holiday in Syria. And my hot tip led you to the Khans, didn’t it?’
‘But not to the grenades, Nils.’
‘That’s not my fault! Look, in the past Ozymandias has gone out east when it got too hot at home.’
‘Essex?’
‘Bangkok. Pattaya. Manila. Saigon. But he’ll be back when he runs out of money. Probably. And I’m sure those grenades are going to turn up, Max.’
I gave him back his drugs.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
Saturday afternoon was party time.
I had been careful with my driving, making sure that I arrived on the wide, tree-lined street exactly five minutes after the assigned pick-up time, just late enough to not have to wait around outside.
It was one of those rich suburbs that make the city seem light years away, a neighbourhood where it was impossible to believe that anything bad could ever happen.
There were balloons on the door of the house where my ex-wife lived with her new family. Not so new now, I reminded myself.
I left Stan in the passenger seat, whimpering in protest at the outrage of being abandoned alone in the car in this weird-smelling place with its mown lawns and clean pavements.
But my ex-wife really hates dogs.
I took a breath and rang the bell, steeling myself for the sight of Scout unhappy and isolated and tearful surrounded by children half her size, ready to scoop her up and run for home.
But the door was opened by the new guy – how many decades would have to go by before I stopped thinking of him as the new guy? – and I immediately saw that Scout was having a good time.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, laughing and happy, a slightly torn paper party hat on her head, while four-year-old boys and girls milled around her in all their jelly-smeared, sugar-crazed anarchy, waiting to be taught some complicated hand-clapping game that only this big girl knew.
At seven Scout was a few years older than the birthday boy – I realised I should try to remember his name – and his little pals, but just one look told me that all my fears had been unfounded. Scout had enjoyed the party. More than this, thanks to her sweet nature and kind heart, she had been the star.
Anne stepped away from a group of parents drinking something bubbly and approached me. She was still a stunning woman – tall, dark, with an understated exotic look that made you think she could come from anywhere in the world. She had once been a model but it had not worked out. It’s a hard old game, looking good for a living.
‘Max,’ she said.
How many nights had we slept side by side? More than a thousand. And now we did not know each other at all. Now she had this other life and I had my own life too. Once she had been closer to me than anyone in the world and now she was this beautiful stranger. I would never get used to the distance between us. It would never seem normal to me.
‘Scout’s been so great with the little ones,’ she said. ‘It’s been hilarious.’
So great, I thought. It’s not enough being simply great. It has to be so great. And why was it hilarious?
Who was this woman?
We exchanged pleasantries and platitudes and I forgot what they were the moment they were out of my mouth. A group of adoring sprogs trailed Scout to the door.
My daughter was smiling – a broad, open beautiful smile.
Stan was still having a moan in the car.
But then nothing upset him like the thought of our pack falling apart.