I came out of the meeting with the IPCC and drove to the East End.
There was a small shrine to Alice Stone under the blue lamp above the entrance to Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel. The great tide of flowers that had washed up on Borodino Street was a fading memory now but here, at her place of work, they would never forget.
There were cards of condolences, addressed to her husband, on a neat pile of bouquets, some of them dying inside their cellophane, some fresh that morning, and cut from a newspaper there was one of the photographs that had been harvested from the happiest moments of her life.
Alice was on a hotel tennis court somewhere sunny, a baby under one arm. The baby was clearly teething, pressing its pink gums into the tennis ball it was clutching as Alice laughed with joy in her life and delight at her luck.
‘People feel they know her,’ Jackson Rose said. ‘People who never met her. And I suppose they do.’ He must have come out of the station but I had not been aware of his presence until he spoke. There were three new sergeant stripes on the sleeve of his jacket.
‘Is Ray Vann inside?’ I said.
Jackson nodded, his eyes still on the photograph of Alice Stone.
‘What happened to him?’ I said.
Now he looked at me. ‘Ray came clean,’ he said.
‘And why the hell did he do that, Jackson?’
He shrugged.
‘You better ask him yourself.’
We got the lift down to the shooting range in the basement. Jackson swiped us in with his card. The whiplash crack of live ammunition filled the air.
There was an armoury desk to the right where weapons were checked in and out and, to the left, a line of firing booths, all of them occupied by officers wearing headphones and eyeglasses, squeezing off shots at paper targets that were as far away as twenty-five metres and as close as ten.
Ray Vann was in the far booth, his firing arm steady as a pool cue as he blew out the bullseye of a paper target of an armed man, his shots placed so perfectly together that the hole in the target could have been put there by a shotgun. There was someone with him in the booth.
Jesse Tibbs.
‘You got promoted,’ I said to Jackson as we watched Vann squeezing off his shots.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When we slot someone we always get a medal or a jail sentence. One or the other.’
There was a TV on the wall behind the armoury desk. Sir Ludo Mount was giving a press conference.
‘In the light of fresh revelations, I can reveal that the IPCC will be recommending to the Crown Prosecuting Service that the death of Adnan Khan be prosecuted as murder,’ the lawyer said to a forest of microphones. ‘My client – Mrs Azza Khan, the mother of Adnan Khan – will also be filing a civil lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police and relevant individuals.’
Jackson nodded at the TV and the uniformed sergeant on the armoury desk hit the mute button.
Jesse Tibbs came out of the end booth, holding the tattered remains of the paper target. His face was covered in the sweat of the firing range, caused by the combination of claustrophobia and tension.
Then Ray Vann emerged, looking calm and relaxed, still wearing eyeglasses but with his ear mufflers around his neck. He was still holding his handgun.
‘I dropped you in it,’ Vann said to me. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said.
I had been in a thousand interview rooms and I knew the importance of sticking to your story. Whatever happened in that basement, I intended to keep on insisting that I didn’t see him do it.
I was never going to rat him out.
But now he had done it to himself.
I watched Vann’s eyes lift to the silent TV screen and then drift away. He did not seem to register that it was his destiny that Sir Ludo was talking about.
‘What happened, Ray?’ I said.
He stared at the floor, as if he was still trying to work it out himself.
‘The IPCC was like a dog with a bone,’ he said. ‘The old man and that blonde. Hunt and Flynn. They wouldn’t let it go. They kept hammering away about the post-mortem trajectory of the gunshot. They knew they had me from the start. They put those autopsy drawings on the table and just left them there. All through all of my interviews, the drawings were always there, as if I had never given a credible explanation for the angle of the shot. And the little man in the profile drawing always had a line entering his chest and leaving around the base of his spine. That’s how he died. A single shot entered Adnan Khan’s heart and exited from his lower back. The IPCC kept insisting that I must have killed him in cold blood. And in the end I agreed with them. In the end I didn’t know what else I could do.’
‘You could have backed him up from the start,’ Tibbs hissed at me.
Vann looked at him gently. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, Jesse,’ he said. ‘My story never made sense.’
I glanced up at the silent TV screen. Sir Ludo Mount was still talking.
‘Listen to me, Ray,’ I said. ‘That barrister up there will ruin you. He will see you jailed. He will destroy your family. You need to get your Federation rep to produce evidence that you are suffering from adjustment disorder caused by your service in Afghanistan. It is a legitimate defence.’
I looked at Jackson for back-up and he nodded.
‘Shrinks talk about the stressors – the stresses, it means – that lead to mental illness,’ Jackson said. ‘It’s true, Ray. PTSD is not an excuse. It’s a reason.’
Ray Vann’s back stiffened with pride.
‘Tell them I’m a nutjob?’ he said. ‘Because I served my country? You call that a defence? That I killed the bastard because I’m a raving loony?’ He shook his head. ‘Never, Max. I know you mean well, but that’s just not going to happen. You know why I killed him? Because he deserved to die. Because he had it coming. Because he deliberately brought that Air Ambulance down on all those innocent people in Lake Meadows. Because him and his brother – and his dad, for all I know, and his mother and the whole rotten lot of them – would dance on our children’s graves if we let them.’
‘It’s war,’ Jesse Tibbs said, his face in mine. ‘And they started it.’
I put my hand on his chest and shoved him away.
‘Are you the one going down for murder, Tibbs?’ I said. ‘Then shut your cakehole.’
He came at me and Jackson got between us and seized Tibbs by the scruff of the neck.
Ray Vann smiled at us like an indulgent parent.
His confession to the IPCC had left him curiously calm. And I had seen that in a thousand interview rooms too. The relief that comes with finally having the truth in the light, no matter how terrible it may be.
‘You OK, Raymond?’ Jackson said, and it was an echo of the day we went into Borodino Street, and I thought about my conversation with Vann in the locker room at Gravesend, and how the country he had served would never know of the things he had seen, and the terror he had endured, and how it felt to see the body parts of your fallen friends strung from trees to mock you.
‘I might stay a little longer,’ Ray Vann said.
‘That’s a good idea,’ Jackson said.
Vann looked longingly around the firing range. I wondered how long it would be before he was under arrest for murder. He would not be coming down here ever again and he seemed to know it.
Jesse Tibbs put his arm around Ray Vann. Jackson and I watched the pair of them return to the booth.
‘He’s not going to hide behind a plea of adjustment disorder, Max,’ Jackson said. ‘Not a guy like that.’
‘He wouldn’t be hiding behind it,’ I said. ‘It’s what’s happened to him. Vann’s a damaged man, Jackson. They sent him to their dirty war, all those politicians who never heard a shot fired that wasn’t on the grouse moor, and it broke something inside him.’
Jackson shook his head. ‘Maybe. But he is just not going to claim to be some kind of victim, Max. He would rather go down.’
‘And what do you think they’re going to do to him when he tells them that Adnan Khan deserved to die?’ I said. ‘They’re going to put him away for life. Do you have any idea what it’s like for a former police officer doing hard time? And then there’s going to be a civil case that takes the Met – and his family – to the cleaners. They’re going to crucify him, Jackson.’
And then it was all one unbroken moment.
Tibbs shouted, ‘Raymond!’ and I saw Vann turn his back on his friend in the end booth, barging Tibbs away with his shoulder as Vann lifted the Glock to his open mouth and tilted his head back and pulled the trigger and the top of his head came off in an explosion of blood and bone.
Ray Vann’s body fell as if the life had fled from him like a light going out as Tibbs froze, staring at the splatter on the walls of the booth and down the front of his uniform, the dead body of his friend at his feet.