The safe house was on one of those streets where they were moving out the students and the working class and moving in the trust fund managers and the bankers. It was south of the river, Elephant and Castle way, but in eighteen months it would look like the future.
Building work was everywhere – scaffolding and skips, the constant buzz of drills, the calls of the men in a dozen languages. Already it hardly looked like South London.
I thought Flashman and CTU would have assigned a couple of plain-clothes officers to watch over the safe house, an age-appropriate man and woman pretending to be lovers, but there was only a detective I knew from New Scotland Yard, a large man tucking into a meat pasty in an unmarked squad car. He gave me the nod as I parked the BMW X5 and crossed the street to the nondescript door of a shabby terraced house that seemed untouched by the booming property market.
Edie Wren opened the door. I could hear a woman screaming, poised somewhere between hysterical grief and righteous fury. And I could hear placating voices, telephones ringing and Mrs Azza Khan raving in Urdu.
‘Welcome to the nut house,’ Edie smiled.
We went into the living room where Sir Ludo Mount was chairing a meeting at the dining table, his bright-eyed juniors sifting through files and tapping laptops and phones as Ahmed Khan sat quietly across from the lawyer. His wife was on the sofa screaming at a translator and the FLO and Layla sat miserably by her side, her long black hair falling across her face as she hid herself from the world.
‘So they got Layla back from social services?’ I asked.
‘I got Layla back from social services,’ Edie said. She glanced across at the teenager, her face softening. ‘I made a few calls. The last thing she needs right now is being locked up in some care home. She’s a really good kid, Max. And the only one I feel sorry for.’
‘But the parents didn’t do anything, Edie.’
‘Apart from bringing those bastards into the world. Layla’s the only truly innocent one among them.’
I looked at her.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll keep the entire family safe from harm.’
TDC Adams was in a corner of the room hunched over her laptop.
‘Curtis Gane’s mother died,’ I told Edie.
She nodded, trying to give the news the emotion and respect it deserved. I knew how much she had liked Mrs Gane. But there had been so much death recently. From Lake Meadows to Borodino Street, life in our city had increasingly resembled life in wartime. There was hardly time to process one loss before the next loss and then the next.
‘Any death threats?’ I said.
‘You kidding?’ Edie said. ‘I’ve lost count of the people threatening to top the Khans. The BBC showed Mr Khan leaving custody just as Alice Stone’s orphaned children were looking at all those flowers.’ She paused to stare at the bus driver and lowered her voice, although no one could hear her with Mrs Khan at full volume. ‘There’s a lot of real anger out there, Max. Some of it is just the usual social media barking, but some of it is serious enough to be a cause for concern.’ She pulled out her phone and called up Twitter. ‘Bad Moses has been trending.’
‘Bad Moses?’
She handed me her phone. ‘Try to keep up, Max. Bad Moses just posted another message. Look.’
The Twitter account @BadMoses displayed a small colour photograph of a righteously enraged man with long flowing white hair and a flowing white beard holding a stone tablet above his head.
‘Father Christmas?’ I said.
‘Close,’ Edie said. ‘It’s Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments,’ she said. ‘Academy Award for Best Picture in 1956. I Googled it. There are reams of the stuff but this gives you a taste. Additional dialogue from the Bible.’
I read the message.
Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written – VENGEANCE IS MINE; I WILL REPAY, SAYS THE LORD. #LakeMeadows #BorodinoStreet #AliceStoneRIP #BadMoses
The message was accompanied by an attached snatched image of Ahmed Khan leaving Paddington Green. It had an alarming number of likes and re-Tweets.
I gave Edie back her phone.
‘You run this down?’ I said.
I thought of what the woman from MI5 had told me.
We can’t watch all of them, DC Wolfe. Because there are too many.
‘Colin is trying to dig out the IP address of Bad Moses,’ Edie said.
Colin was Colin Cho of PCeU – the Police Central e-crime Unit, tasked with responding to the most serious crimes on the Internet.
‘But Bad Moses is running his posts through some kind of anonymiser like Tor or 12P, like they have in the Deep Web, the state-of-the-art anonymisers they use for distributing child pornography. So, realistically, Colin hasn’t got much of a shot at locating an IP address.’
She glanced across at Ahmed Khan.
‘There are plenty of other users on social media making threats against the Khans who are not hidden behind thick digital walls,’ she said. ‘We can turn Colin loose on them. We can run them down, knock on a few doors, drag them into the light and smack their bottoms to discourage the others.’ She looked at me and shrugged. ‘But we end up chasing inadequate little morons who don’t have a life beyond playing with their mouse. And that doesn’t make the Khan family any safer and doesn’t make our job any easier. So maybe we should let Bad Moses rant and rave online while we are knocking on different doors.’
We joined TDC Adams in her quiet corner.
‘Show him what you showed me, Joy,’ Edie said.
I looked over Adams’ shoulder at her laptop. It was a YouTube film shot on Borodino Street just after the husband and children of Alice Stone had left. The atmosphere had palpably changed. Grief had given way to rage.
In the middle of a crowd of young men, someone had filmed George Halfpenny on his soapbox, his voice cracking with emotion.
‘This is a country where the wicked walk free and the good die fifty years before their time,’ he was saying. ‘A country where we applaud immigration without integration and then wonder why the newcomers have no respect for us, or our history, or our values. And so we dig our own graves – like the graves we have dug in Lake Meadows and on Borodino Street. And so we place upon the altar the bravest and the best of us. And so children lose their mother, and a husband sacrifices his wife. And for what? So that the scum of the earth can build a funeral pyre for all we love? Here on this street we have to decide – do we let them bully us, betray us and bury us? What do we need to do to finally remember who we are – and start fighting back? My friends, I beg you to remember and to never forget – this is still our country.’
The crowd roared. The phone’s camera jerkily panned to the faces of one hundred young men with their blood up.
‘Still our country!’
‘Still our country!’
‘Still our country!’
‘George Halfpenny could tone down the rhetoric,’ I told Edie. ‘But no court is going to say those words constitute a death threat or even an incitement to violence.’
‘I’m not worried about the rickshaw driver,’ Edie said. ‘It’s all the people who are listening to him.’
I looked across at Ahmed Khan.
He smiled gently at me, and rose from the table to join us.
‘When can I go home?’ he asked.
‘Mr Khan,’ I said.
‘Arnold,’ he said.
‘Arnold,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be issuing you an Osman warning. It means we consider there to be a real and immediate threat to your life.’ I nodded at Sir Ludo Mount. ‘Your lawyer will be familiar with the procedure. You will be given a letter from us telling you that your life may be in immediate danger and you should take all necessary precautions to protect yourself and your family. As an absolute minimum, I strongly advise against any attempt to return to your former home.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘And I am returning to work on Sunday.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I began.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. I have not done anything wrong. And I wish to return to my life.’
I looked at Edie.
‘You’ve been in a cell at Paddington Green,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ve any idea of what is happening on Borodino Street.’
‘People are angry,’ he said. ‘They hate my sons for all the terrible things they did. And I understand. But their sin is not my sin.’ He lightly placed his hand on my arm for emphasis. ‘In the end, every parent loses their child,’ he said. ‘I know now that I lost my sons long ago. But I want my life back. And I will not allow my sons – or anyone else – to steal it from me.’
Sir Ludo Mount joined us, giving me a little nod and completely ignoring Edie and Joy.
The sleek old brief had a curiously offhand attitude to police officers of all ranks, as if we were dimwitted room service waiters who were hanging around for a tip.
‘I don’t think it is safe for Mr Khan to return home,’ I said.
‘Mr Khan is going home to Borodino Street as soon as his property is no longer deemed a crime scene,’ Sir Ludo told me, as if I had not spoken. ‘I understand from my sources that will be formally declared over the next twenty-four hours.’ The lawyer waved a well-manicured and dismissive hand. ‘Issue your Osman warning and leave us.’
I took a breath.
‘Do you seriously want to put this family in harm’s way?’ I said. ‘Because that is exactly what is going to happen if they return to Borodino Street. Is that really what you want?’
A faint flush appeared on Sir Ludo’s heavily moisturised chops.
‘What do I want?’ he said. ‘Is that your question?’
He gave me the full theatrical blaze of outrage that had wowed a thousand courtrooms.
‘I want a complete investigation into the shoot-to-kill policy of the Metropolitan Police,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want. And I want a formal apology to the Khan family. I want a reappraisal of the way firearms are used in this country. I want all of that, and I want it done as soon as possible. And I want your colleague SFO DC Raymond Vann to be brought to justice for the death of Adnan Khan in that basement.’
‘I’m just trying to keep your client alive, sir,’ I said.
‘And I promise you that you will be in serious trouble if you fail to do so,’ he said.
He left us, and with an apologetic smile, Ahmed Khan joined Sir Ludo and his well-spoken helpers at the dining table. They were young, eager, hard-working and totally in thrall to their famous master.
The YouTube film was still running on Joy’s laptop.
I could hear the anger of the mob and I could feel their appetite for blood.
‘What’s the drill?’ Edie said. ‘When someone wants to return home to the scene of a serious crime? To somewhere like Borodino Street?’
I shook my head. There is no drill, Whitestone had told me on the Thames Path. Suddenly I was very tired.
‘If it is no longer a crime scene, and if Mr Khan wants to go home, then we can warn him, and we can advise him against it and we can hope that he uses common sense,’ I said. ‘But we can’t stop him.’
‘That selfish, stubborn old bastard,’ Edie said. ‘It’s not just him going back there, is it?’
And on the other side of that safe house, Layla Khan pushed back her long black hair from her face, looked across at Edie, and I saw her smile for the first time.