There was a scar in the Rothery where Gideon Lockwood’s pub The Hunter’s Horns had burned to the ground. Corrugated iron fences had been erected around it, covered with posters for concerts that had happened months ago, and layers of inventive graffiti. The police station was less than three hundred yards away.
Julie parked in the underground garage and trudged up the ill-lit stairs to the station. The concrete stairwell reeked of piss. It was vile. Astringent. Someone had snuck into the garage and left a message for the constabulary. Julie took some small comfort from knowing that if he was ever on fire, there was at least one local who would do the right thing.
Smiling tiredly, he punched in his four-digit code and when the lock clicked in response, pushed open the security door.
“Evening, handsome,” WPC Melissa Banks said, seeing him from across the room. “The boss is looking for you.”
“Which can’t be good,” he said, changing direction midstride.
“You might be surprised.”
“Will I be?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so. Cheers, Mel.” He pushed through the fire doors to the backstairs. So much for five minutes in and out, and then off home to bed. He climbed two at a time, meeting the Chief Inspector halfway, meaning she’d called up to let Tenaka know he was on his way up. Traitor. He caught himself smiling as he looked up at the boss. It was a power play. Tenaka was only five foot six inches, so he liked to catch officers on the stairs where he could talk down to them.
“Gennaro, just the man I was looking for.” The man’s voice was like grinding stones.
“Sir?”
“Underwood and Kahn, bad business. Any closer to finding the Kirmani boy? It’d be good to get this thing wrapped up before things turn ugly.”
“There hasn’t been a single sighting of Jamshid Kirmani since he fled the boxing club,” Julie admitted. It bugged him. The kid wasn’t smart enough to simply disappear. In this day and age it took serious nous to cover every track, and until a few hours ago Jamshid Kirmani was an ordinary kid, not Ronnie Biggs.
“Known associates? School friends? Anyone who might harbor him?”
“We’re running down leads at the moment. Our best bet’s the family. We’ve got them under surveillance. We’re hoping that Kirmani will reach out to them for help. He can’t run forever. He’s just a kid, and he’s running scared.”
“We can but hope,” Tenaka said, none too convinced. “In the meantime, we’ve had a report of a missing persons case that has me concerned.”
“How long are we talking?”
“The boy didn’t return from football training this evening.”
“So, what, seven or eight hours?”
“Long enough.”
“Checked in with friends? Maybe they went to catch a late movie or something and he ended up crashing at a mate’s and forgot to let Mum and Dad know?”
“His phone was active. We triangulated the signal and traced it to the park where he’d been playing football. Uniform found it under a bench.”
“Kids lose phones all of the time.”
“That they do. But there was blood at the scene, which SOCOs are checking. The lad goes to the same school as Underwood and Kahn. He’s in the year below and by all accounts is something of a rising star. Lots of articles about him being offered terms with several of the Premier League clubs in the area.”
“Well known and popular, and I’m going to assume Muslim?”
“Musa Dajani,” Tenaka said, as though a name by itself was enough to racially profile the kid.
Julie followed his gaffer’s train of thought to the inevitable conclusion, “Which makes him a perfect target for retaliation against an honor killing.”
“That it does. You know what it’s like out there, Gennaro. The anger and fear are festering. There’s a rotten core to it, Gennaro. Our patch is breaking apart. It only takes one idiot to think an eye for an eye is an answer to turn the Rothery into a battlefield, which cannot be allowed to happen. We’re going to increase our visibility over the next few days: more patrols, community outreach, get officers into the schools to talk to the kids.”
“Better than kettling them,” Julie said, only half-joking. “I assume we’ve checked with the local hospitals?”
“No admissions matching Dajani’s description,” Tenaka confirmed.
“You want me to talk to the boy’s parents?”
“They’re downstairs waiting for you.”
“Okay, leave it with me.” His bed was a long way away. He checked his watch. Ten past five. Those poor people must be going out of their minds. The likelihood, if not the absolute reality, was if he wasn’t home now he wasn’t coming home. He couldn’t imagine what they were going through. Packing your kid’s lunch box in the morning, checking he’s got his kit for training before you ship him off out of the door, only for him never to come home again. Julie caught himself on the word never. He couldn’t go in there thinking like that; the boy’s parents would pick up on it. They were frightened; they weren’t idiots.
“I knew I could count on you, Gennaro,” Tenaka turned around and walked back up the stairs, leaving Julie to do the same, in reverse.
Instead of going straight into the interrogation room where the Dajanis were waiting, he stopped by the break room to grab a treacle black coffee. He was still wrestling with the paper filter when Sara Sykes, Melissa’s partner, came in. “Have you seen this?” She held up her mobile phone. He recognized the Twitter app running, but was too far away to read the newsfeed she was watching.
“#ollieunderwood, #rotherystabbing, #justice4ollie, #aishainourhearts, #nohonour, and how about this for a nicely fucked up sentiment? #strikebackLondon.”
He knew the basics about how hashtags worked, creating an index where all of the tweets under the same banner could be aggregated for easy reading by anyone with a computer or mobile phone. It changed the nature of communication. Information spread like wildfire. A single #strikebackLondon tweet could be seen by half a million teenagers in half an hour if the right person retweeted it; after that it would take on a life of its own. It would mutate, different exhortations would follow, everyone weighing in on what a bastard Jamshid Kirmani was, how Ollie was no angel, or how Aisha got what was coming to her, and every opinion in between. Opinions being like arseholes. Anyone looking up Ollie’s or Aisha’s names on the social network would find all of the tweets conveniently arranged to tell the story of the last nine hours.
They had been lucky in that it was raining and London had to sleep. Those two factors had stopped things from exploding all over the internet last night.
But that was yesterday. Today, as the saying went, was another day.
The rain had eased off at dawn, now the sun was coming up and the streets were wet, but the morning was fresh and cool, the air filled with that heady rush that always accompanied the scouring clean of the streets. He’d sensed the tension on the High Street last night, and that was before they knew about Aisha’s death. Both sides were just waiting for the tipping point. And that tipping point was a kid who went to football practice and never came home. When that got out things were going to turn ugly, fast.
“Do I want to know what they are saying?”
“Fuck.”
She pushed the phone toward his face. The latest tweet painted a target squarely on the back of Kirmani: Jamshid Kirmani murdered #ollieunderwood & #aishakahn. Find Kirmani. Time to #strikebackLondon. Demand #justice4ollie. #nohonour #riseup!
“Fuck,” Julie agreed. It was the only fitting sentiment.
Within the next minute or so Kirmani’s name was retweeted a dozen times. The thirteenth tweet linked to his Facebook profile and put his face out there for the world to see. It was the butterfly that flapped its wings in the social media forest and started the perfect storm.
“This changes everything,” Julie said.
“No kidding. We’ve got to find the kid before the mob do. And they’ve got a lot more eyes out there than we have,” which was no word of a lie. If it turned into a witch hunt, there was only ever going to be one outcome. The last thing any of them needed was to get the call that Jamshid Kirmani had been lynched from one of the lampposts in the Rothery, making a martyr of the little shit. “We’ll circulate his picture through the Boroughs, put everyone on alert. Hope we get a hit. Someone somewhere has to have seen him after he fled the boxing club. Techs are already going over footage from the surveillance cameras in the area. If there’s anything to be gleaned from them, they’ll find it.”
“And in the meantime, we need to bring Kirmani’s parents in. Sweat them. He’s out there and we need to find him before anyone else does. If they know anything, we’ve got to get it out of them. It’s their kid, he’s up for murder; they aren’t going to want to turn on him, so don’t hold back.”
“I’ll get Mel to bring them in. You’ve got to wonder what the hell is going on inside his head right now? How do you get to a place where killing the girl you love is ever an answer?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not one the with a degree in deviant psychology, that’s Ellie.”
“I wonder if we can manipulate him into reaching out to the family to hurry it along, rather than just wait?”
“Put Mum and Dad on TV saying ‘Just want him to come home,’ that kind of thing?”
“Maybe not exactly those words, but yeah, appeal to the lost kid in him.”
“That’s assuming he’ll see anything we do.”
“I’ll run it by Tenaka. Can’t be any worse than doing nothing. Assuming the family will get on board.”
“Check with them.”
Julie nodded.
He gave up his struggle with the coffee filter and headed off to find Musa Dajani’s parents in the interview room. They looked up at him so hopefully as he opened the door it broke his heart. He took the seat across from them, waving them to sit as they started to stand. He shook hands with both of them, introducing himself. “Mr. and Mrs. Dajani? I’m Julius Gennaro. I’m the officer looking into your son’s disappearance. Anything you can tell me—anything at all—that might help us find him, would be a tremendous help. Let’s start by talking about his routines. Have you noticed anything different about Musa over the last few days?”
Both Mum and Dad couldn’t shake their heads quickly enough: eager to please, desperate to help, and terrified that they had nothing of use to tell him.
Julie nodded a couple of times, “Have you talked to his coach or friends from football?”
“The last time anyone remembers seeing him was at nine o’clock, walking back through the park,” the boy’s father said.
“Which is where they found his phone,” Mother Dajani added. She choked out a small sob with her next breath, then straightened her back and looked him in the eye. She had her hands clasped, ready to say a prayer. “It’s not good, is it?”
Julie might not have been God, but at least he was listening. He thought about lying; it would have been easy to just say that kids lose their phones all the time and they shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but the seeds of false hope were worse than no hope at all. It wouldn’t be fair to them. “No,” Julie admitted. “It’s not good.” Kids were glued to their mobile phones. Their entire lives were on them. They didn’t willingly leave them behind. So no, it wasn’t good. He debated telling them about the blood, and almost didn’t, but he needed them to trust him so he had to give them a reason to and that meant being straight with them. “My main concern right now is that we found traces of blood at the scene.”
“Oh, God,” Father Dajani said, his mind leaping to the worst-case scenario.
Mum was a little slower to react. “You think it’s his, don’t you?”
“I really don’t want to speculate.”
“Which means you do.”
“It’s a possibility we have to consider,” he said. “Because it changes how we go about things. Right now we’re checking hospital admissions for anyone matching your son’s description. We’ve got people combing through surveillance footage from cameras on the park gates to see if we can see when Musa left and if he left alone. Right now we are in a good place, as good as we can hope in situations like this, as strange as that may seem. The first forty-eight hours are vital in a missing persons case. We’ve got good procedures laid out to help us find your son, and a lot of experience to draw on, but I’m not sure we can treat this as a normal disappearance.”
“Because of the stabbings last night?” Mother Dajani asked.
He could hardly deny it, so he nodded.
“You think the two things are related?”
“I think there’s a strong possibility,” Julie admitted. “And to complicate matters someone has leaked the name of the killer, which is only going to muddy the waters. If we send uniforms out door to door to see if anyone saw anything, they’re going to make the same connection.”
“People will take matters into their own hands,” Father Dajani said, something close to approval in his voice.
“But not turning over every stone decreases the chance of Musa coming home,” Mum said, understanding the dilemma. “So you have to do it. You have to go out there and hammer on every door. You have to.”
She was right; he knew she was right, even if it meant bringing hell to the Kirmanis’ front door.