‘Excuse me?’
The boy edged his way round the other tables. He sat down without invitation and helped himself to a plate of chicken wings.
‘Got to make the most of it. I ain’t going to be eating like this for a while.’
‘Be my guest,’ Sean said. ‘Lizzie, let me introduce Saleem Asaf, Mohammad’s cousin.’
‘Came to tell you I burnt down the shop,’ he said, as he tore the meat off a wing with his teeth.
‘In that case, can I have that chicken bone when you’re done?’ Lizzie said.
He shrugged. ‘What for?’
‘DNA test.’ She patted her envelope.
‘No need, lady. I’ve come here to fess up. Then your boyfriend can arrest me.’
Sean thought this would be a bad moment to look embarrassed.
‘Saleem, what’s this about?’ he said. ‘Get to the point or I’ll have to ask Mr Lee to throw you out.’
‘Criminal damage, can you do me for that? I burnt down the shop, innit. My dad and my uncle are going to land at Manchester Airport in three hours’ time and I can’t be here when they get back.’
‘We’ve been assuming it was a racist attack.’
‘Good.’ Saleem’s mouth was full, but he still crammed more meat in.
‘But you’re willing to admit to arson?’
‘Mmnh, hnh.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I did it. And you can prove it, right?’ he said, handing Lizzie the stripped wing bone.
‘I think so. If your DNA matches the sample we have from the crime scene.’
‘But how?’ Sean said.
‘I think I know,’ Lizzie interrupted. ‘The torchlit parade was making its way round the estate. You sent Ghazala away, telling her to keep herself safe, didn’t you, Saleem? You promised to lock up. Then you waited until the protestors were outside, dropped the bottle full of petrol inside the shop, went out of the back of the building and bolted the shutters.’
Saleem looked impressed. He grabbed a handful of prawn crackers, nodding as he stuffed them in his mouth.
‘But why?’ Lizzie asked. ‘To steal pills from the Health Centre?’
‘Pills? Nah.’
‘So?’ Sean said.
Saleem was still for a moment. ‘Are you wearing a wire?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Saleem, this is Doncaster, not Baltimore.’ Sean said. ‘No, I’m not wearing a wire. Just get on with it.’
‘I’m not under arrest yet?’
‘No, but you will be for wasting police time in a minute.’
Saleem flicked the tassels of the tablecloth.
‘OK. I thought you’d pin it on those CUC Nazis and that would serve them right. The thing is, I didn’t want to run the shop. I don’t want to stay on the Chasebridge estate all my life, and with Mo gone, that was my destiny, d’you get me?’
‘What about your sister?’ Sean said.
Saleem hesitated.
‘Surely she’d run the shop?’
‘I can’t stay there. She can’t either. It’s not safe for either of us.’ He lifted his T-shirt up to show his dressing, as if that explained everything.
‘Is there something you haven’t told me?’
‘Yeah.’ He turned another chicken wing over in his fingers and put it down again. ‘That other detective said you got some shoe prints from the bottom of the stairs at Eagle Mount Two. From a potential witness? Well, they’re mine. Your man took my shoes away from the hospital. I know he’s going to work it out sooner or later. But I never had anything to do with Mo’s murder, right? I walked in on them, Starkey and his crew, and a couple of younger lads, the ones I knew. Mo was already dead, but they were cutting him, daring each other …’
His face twisted with the effort of trying not to revisit what he’d seen. Lizzie leant forward.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I understand. I’m sorry you had to see that.’
‘Is that right?’ Sean asked Lizzie. ‘Do the shoes match the prints?’
‘I’ll have to check, they’re somewhere in a backlog of evidence, but maybe that’s where the other half of my ant’s got to.’
‘Your what?’ Saleem looked confused, but Sean decided there wasn’t time to explain.
‘Did your sister know who Mohammad was going to meet,’ Sean said, ‘the night he was killed?’
‘She guessed,’ Saleem said. ‘Mo got a text from his girl, but it wasn’t really from her, you know what I mean? Her brother took her phone. He texted Mo, pretending to be her.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Because he told me. He thinks he’s the big man, Kamran Ahmed, but he’s just a dog.’ He sucked his teeth. ‘He was playing gangsters. Met up with Starkey in a club, paid him to be his chauffeur and that. Cool as a cucumber he turns up to the shop, the day after Mo’s murder, talking dirty to Ghazala, calling her a slag. She’s had troubles, man. Some boy hurt her, I told you this before, but it weren’t her fault. It doesn’t make her a slag.’
He paused for a reaction but Sean and Lizzie simply stared at him.
‘So I told him what I thought of his family. You know? To return the favour. Now maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but he dissed my sister. I told him that his sister was the slag, she was the one that crept upstairs, to our flat, to fuck her boyfriend. Kamran Ahmed said he knew that, and why did I think Mo was dead? Did I really think those gora dogs cared about him, some has-been errand boy? It was never about drugs. They killed Mo for money. Kamran’s money. He told me how he set it up. He even clicked his fucking fingers to show how easy he thought it was.’
‘Who did you see, Saleem?’ Sean said. ‘When you arrived at Eagle Mount Two? We need a name.’
‘Starkey – it was him, with the knife, cutting down there, like—’ Saleem’s eyes filled up and he rubbed his knuckles into them to take away what he’d seen. ‘Kamran added a bit of spice to make sure they’d go through with it. He told them Mo had raped a girl, a little white girl.’
‘Was Kamran there?’ Sean said.
‘No.’
‘And did Starkey see you?’
Saleem shook his head. ‘I came in and I went back out. I wasn’t hanging around. One of the other boys must have told him I’d been a lookout because Starkey didn’t say nothing when he did this,’ he fingered the front of his T-shirt, ‘but I swear, if he knew I’d been there, he’d have finished me.’
‘And when Mohammad was being chased, Starkey’s mother was watching from her window. Another lookout,’ said Lizzie.
‘Ghazala said Mohammad was happy when he left the shop that night,’ Sean said, quietly.
‘She keeps saying she should have stopped him,’ Saleem said. ‘She used to talk to that girl. I think they became friends. My sister doesn’t have many friends. And now the girl’s dead too.’
Saleem was still, as if he’d finally run out of energy.
‘Taheera was a virgin, Saleem,’ said Lizzie. ‘Whatever else they were doing upstairs, it wasn’t that.’
The boy stared at his hands.
‘I was so scared,’ he said.
Sean took a deep breath. ‘Come on Saleem, let’s go round to the police station, you can hand yourself in there for the arson. I’m not actually on duty right now, just having a nice quiet lunch with a friend. I can’t promise anything, but if you can stick to this story under oath, I think we might be able to help you. You’ve done the right thing in telling me, Saleem. Remember that.’
‘And you remember,’ Saleem said, ‘that you promised to look after my sister.’
Sean nodded, but he wasn’t sure that Ghazala needed his help; she seemed more than able to stick up for herself.
‘Right, I’d better come with you and give this to DCI Khan,’ Lizzie picked up the brown envelope. ‘And then, Sean, you and I need to have a bit of a talk.’
‘Oh?’
‘We need to talk about your sister, your new half-sister.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Doncaster
Through the glass window of the observation room, Sean and Lizzie could see Kamran Ahmed sitting back in the chair, as if this was just a casual conversation. A night in custody had done little to ruffle his appearance, only his hair sat a little flatter. He pressed his hands together, fingers straight, and nodded slowly at something his interviewer was saying.