TANNAHILL KHAN, HALFWAY DOWN FOUR flights of stairs with three heavy boxes pulling his arms from his sockets, feels the phone buzz in his pocket.
“Shit,” he mutters, knowing what a call to that phone means.
He traps the stack of boxes against the wall with his body, pulls the phone from his jacket, and checks the caller ID—Special Ops Dispatch.
“Shit,” he murmurs again before answering. “DCI Khan.”
“We have a report of a serious assault,” the dispatcher says. “Knife attack.” She lists the details—home intrusion, female victim, private address in Highgate.
Tannahill does a rough calculation in his head of how much extra pain this is going to add to his already painful day. “OK,” he says. “Could you tell the other DCs to pick me up out front of the NoLMS offices.”
“Roger.” The dispatcher hangs up.
“NoLMS”—North London Murder Squad—Tannahill had stressed the “N” and the “L” but everyone who wasn’t in the unit pronounced it “gnomes,” largely to take the piss out of anyone who was in it.
Tannahill tucks the phone back in his pocket, adjusts his grip on the stack of boxes, and continues his journey down.
His plan had been to spend the morning going over the data gleaned from the documents in these boxes before the lunchtime press conference where the latest crime stats are due to be released. A few weeks back his boss had given him the heads-up on how bad they were and told him to try and find something in previous figures that made the current ones seem less alarming, particularly in relation to his area of expertise, knife crime. You think these figures are bad, it’s nothing compared to 2004—that kind of thing. Spin, basically.
Unfortunately, the only thing Tannahill had found highlighted just how terrible the latest figures really were. He had planned to spend the morning massaging the historical data by lumping other crimes under the general heading of “street crime” to make the old figures seem higher, but now this new case has torpedoed his day. Maybe if people stopped stabbing each other for five minutes he might have a fighting chance of figuring out why people keep stabbing each other every five minutes.
He pushes through the front door of the building and spots a black Mercedes minivan parked across the road on double yellow lines, hazard lights blinking, a black-jacketed driver standing by the open front door smoking a cigarette. Tannahill hefts the boxes to secure his slipping grip and makes his way over. “You the courier?” he asks.
The driver blows smoke out with his reply. “Do I look like a facking courier, mate?”
He is clean-shaven, with short black hair, black T-shirt under a black jacket, wireless buds in his ears, probably Bluetoothed to the phone charging in the cradle visible through the open door of the Mercedes. “Yes,” Tannahill says.
The driver drops his cigarette and steps on it as he moves closer until his chest bumps against the stack of evidence boxes, knocking Tannahill back on his heels slightly. “You being funny, mate?” He is short and has to look up at Tannahill, though the height difference doesn’t seem to bother him.
Tannahill can smell the sour smoke-and-coffee fog of his breath. He is about to reply when another car appears down the street, a black Volkswagen people carrier, practically identical to the parked Mercedes. It moves slowly, the driver leaning forward in his seat as he checks the numbers of the buildings. The current offices of NoLMS are spread over a couple of rented floors of an ugly anonymous building in Holloway and are almost impossible to find, even with GPS.
“My mistake,” Tannahill says, stepping past the angry driver and into the road so the real courier can see him.
“Oi, ISIS, where you think you’re going?” the driver says, following him into the road. “What’s in them boxes anyway, a bomb?”
Tannahill feels a familiar anger rise inside him, but the duty phone buzzes in his pocket again, reminding him he has much bigger fish to fry as the Volkswagen pulls to a halt in front of him and the tailgate starts to rise. He moves to the back of the car, the boxes feeling ten times heavier now than when he started, and the courier gets out to help.
“Oi, ISIS, don’t you ignore me,” the other driver shouts.
The courier looks shocked. “Don’t worry about him,” Tannahill says, lowering the boxes gratefully into the back of the Volkswagen. “You got the transfer documents?”
“You two a couple of benders?” the driver continues, refusing to let it drop. “Them boxes full of dildos or summink?”
Tannahill flexes the stiffness from his hands, scribbles his signature on the paperwork, then pulls his buzzing phone from his pocket, silencing it with a jab of his finger.
“I’m on the street out front,” Tannahill says. “How close are you?” He nods at the answer, then hangs up. He waits for the courier to drive away, then finally turns to the angry driver. “What was that you said I looked like?”
The driver sneers. “A poof,” he says. “You look like a poof and a terrorist.”
Tannahill nods. “It’s the brown skin, isn’t it? Brown skin, must be a terrorist. When I was growing up I was called all sorts—Paki, camel jockey, raghead. My dad was Pakistani, you see, Irish mum but I got his skin and hair, so . . .”
A siren starts up somewhere nearby, the sound bouncing off the buildings, making it impossible to tell where it’s coming from.
“When I went to high school I pretended to be Italian for a while, thought it might silence the twats. Didn’t really think it through. Ended up being called a dago and a spic instead, at least I did until someone found out the truth and all the old names came flooding back, or they did until 9/11.”
The sound of the siren doubles as a dark gray Vauxhall Insignia appears round the corner, blue lights flashing behind the grill. Tannahill holds his hand up to the driver.
“Since 9/11 and 7/7 I mostly get called things like Osama, or Taliban, or what was the one you called me? ISIS.”
The car pulls to a halt, the ear-splitting siren shredding the air. Tannahill draws his hand across his throat in a cutting motion and the siren goes silent. He pulls a small leather wallet from his pocket, lets it fall open, and watches the driver’s expression change as he sees the warrant card and reads the words printed on it:
POLICE OFFICER
Tannahill Khan
Detective Chief Inspector
“So let me ask you again,” Tannahill says, slipping the wallet back in his pocket. “What do I look like?”
The driver swallows. “A copper,” he says, all the piss and vinegar now drained from his voice.
Tannahill nods slowly, then looks over at the parked Mercedes minivan. “This your vehicle, sir?”
The driver nods.
“Nice.” Tannahill moves round to the front and looks at the registration plate. “This year’s reg too. Let me ask you something, do you know what an ANPR camera is?”
The driver shakes his head.
“It stands for Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It’s everywhere now—traffic lights, junctions, roundabouts, car parks—we only have to tap in the registration of a car we’re interested in and the moment it drives by a camera on the network, it pings up on a central computer, which sends an alert to the nearest squad car, which then pulls it over faster than you can say ‘I didn’t do anything, officer, someone must’ve put my registration on the system because I was a bit racist.’” Tannahill takes a step closer and lowers his voice. “Look at me.” The driver looks up but his chin is down, like a dog who knows he’s chewed the wrong shoe.
“We all make mistakes. The most important thing is to own them and learn from them, do you understand what I’m saying?”
The driver nods. Swallows. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
“What was that?”
“Sorry,” he says, a little louder this time.
Tannahill pauses for just long enough for it to become uncomfortable, then smiles. “Good lad.” He steps away from him and gets into the passenger seat of the waiting squad car. “Oh, and just for the record,” he says, before closing the door, “you really do look like a courier.”
Then he slams the door and the car takes off down the street, lights flashing, siren screaming.