‘No.’
‘Is he lying?’
I felt my mouth tighten.
‘Our colleagues in SCO19 are under enormous – unimaginable – pressure,’ I said. ‘C3 is not lying – he is mistaken. Did you ever hear a shot fired in anger?’ I said. ‘Sir?’
‘Are you trying to insult me, DC Wolfe?’
‘I’m trying to see if you understand what sustained automatic gunfire does to everything – your hearing, your blood pressure, your balance, your heart rate, your perception of time. All of it. Gunfire is strange – it just seems to crowd out the rest of the world. It takes over. It dominates everything. So I don’t think DC Vann is lying to you, sir,’ I repeated for the tape. ‘I think that he is mistaken.’
‘Maybe you’re the one who is mistaken, DC Wolfe. Is that also a possibility?’
‘I am quite certain that I was not in that basement until after Mr Khan died.’
‘Did Mr Khan get what was coming to him, DC Wolfe?’ Hunt said.
‘I don’t think terrorists can reasonably expect to die of old age in their beds, sir.’
‘Did you and C3 speak to each other?’ Flynn said. ‘When you finally arrived in the basement?’
‘I believe I said his name. His first name. Raymond. I do not recall C3 – DC Vann – speaking to me.’
‘But you said that you had never met before,’ Hunt said. ‘So how did you know his name?’
I told them the truth without thinking about it.
‘Because DS Stone spoke to him when we were on our way to Borodino Street. She said, “You OK, Raymond?” So I knew his name was Raymond.’
‘C3 says that Khan was on his feet and making a sudden move for what he assumed to be a weapon,’ Hunt said. ‘And this is why we are struggling to believe his version of events.’
Flynn touched her keyboard and two line-drawings of a little generic man appeared on the screen, face on and sideways. The sideways drawing has a line entering the drawn man around the middle of his chest and leaving around the bottom of his back.
‘That’s the post-mortem trajectory of the gunshot that killed Mr Khan,’ Hunt said. ‘Ballistics inform us that a single shot entered Mr Khan’s heart and exited from the base of his spine. And as you can see, the autopsy agrees with this theory.’
‘How do you explain it?’ Flynn said. ‘If Mr Khan was standing and making an abrupt movement for a weapon? Why did the gunshot enter his chest on entry and exit just above his buttocks? If he was standing, it doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘I am not attempting to explain it,’ I said.
The IPCC investigators took a moment.
‘Mr Khan was on his knees when he was shot, wasn’t he, DC Wolfe?’ Hunt said. ‘DC Vann was pumped up, understandably terrified, full of anger about what had just happened to his team leader on the street. He had an unarmed man on his knees and he executed him. Isn’t that what happened, DC Wolfe?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Hunt.’
‘Because you were not in the basement when it happened,’ he said.
And it wasn’t a question.
Because they had no more questions for me.
I rode down to the ground floor with my Federation rep.
‘Heroes before breakfast,’ he said. ‘Murderers before mid-morning tea. Who’d be a shot, eh?’
We shook hands.
‘Not me,’ I said.
Back in MIR-1, TDC Adams had a message for me.
‘Paddington Green called,’ she said. ‘You should call DCI Flashman.’
I returned Flashman’s call.
‘You want Ahmed Khan, Wolfe?’ he said. ‘You can have him.’
‘You’re not charging him?’
‘You were right,’ Flashman said. ‘He’s as simple as he looks. As far as we can make out, all his known associates are other bus drivers. And get this, Wolfe: the old man says he wants to go home.’ Flashman was chuckling with amusement. ‘To the house on Borodino Street!’
I looked up at the TV screen. I saw the crowds, the flowers for Alice Stone, the house that had been torn apart. I could not imagine anyone ever living in that place again.
‘So Ahmed Khan’s not running an al-Qaeda cell from the number 73 bus, Flashman? That’s a turn-up for the book.’
I heard his hot breath.
‘The man had three sons,’ Flashman said. ‘Every one of them was a murdering jihadist bastard. He’s bloody lucky to be getting out so soon. Accept nothing, believe no one, check everything. How did you miss that lecture at Hendon, Wolfe? Were you walking that little dog of yours?’
‘If you smell guilt on him, then why are you slinging him out, Flashman?’
The police can hold someone for twenty-four hours before we either have to charge them with a crime or set them free. The only exception is if someone is suspected of terrorism. Then we can hold them for fourteen days.
‘We need the cell,’ Flashman said. ‘This old bus driver is a cell-blocker for the really bad boys. We will let him sweat for a few more days – that should be long enough for the generous British state to find him and his family a safe house – and then we will chuck him out. Dig out the welcome mat, Wolfe.’
Edie Wren and Joy Adams were staring at me as I hung up.
‘They’re releasing Ahmed Khan without charge,’ I said.
‘And what are we meant to do with him?’ Edie said.
I looked again at the crowds and the flowers and the cops on Borodino Street.
‘Keep him alive,’ I said.
9
At the end of a week when the death toll at the Lake Meadows shopping centre crept up to forty-six, and the crowds kept coming to Borodino Street, and the sea of flowers just kept getting bigger, I drove one hour west of the city and I parked the old BMW X5 in a spot where all I could see were green rolling hills with the river running through them, the Thames – and it was still the Thames out here – molten gold in the sunshine of early summer.
I let Stan off the leash and he busied himself nibbling the grass, delicately careful as a rabbit, while I sat on a bench by the towpath and stared upriver. The track leading to Henley-on-Thames had a scattering of joggers, dog walkers and tourists who had strolled out of town. As Stan munched grass – he found it aided his digestion – I watched the river with its sightseeing boats and the sculls of rowers.
After a while I saw them coming down the towpath.
A small woman with fair hair and dark glasses, maybe forty, and a teenage boy, no older than sixteen but a full head and shoulders taller than the woman. But they still looked like mother and son. The boy also wore dark glasses and there was an assistance dog loping at his side, a Labrador-Retriever mix with fur the colour of melted butter.
The woman was Detective Chief Inspector Pat Whitestone, my senior officer and the most experienced homicide cop in West End Central. The boy was her son Justin, who had lost his sight in one of those mindless eruptions of violence that can come out of nowhere in the teenage years.
And the dog was Dasher.
Stan’s nose perked up at the familiar scent of Dasher and he ran off to greet the party and his old friend. Whitestone and Justin greeted him warmly but Dasher, who had been trained to never be distracted from his role, merely gave Stan a quick butt-sniff for form’s sake and then looked up at his master.
‘How’s the holiday?’ I asked them.
Whitestone and Justin were walking the full length of the Thames Path, the national trail that runs for almost two hundred miles from the river’s source deep in the heart of the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier in the East End.
‘Cool,’ Justin said.
‘You should do it with Scout,’ Whitestone said. ‘Best walk in the country.’
Justin walked down to the riverbank with the two dogs, Stan capering with mad glee by the side of the calm, solemn Dasher.
‘Not too close to the water,’ Whitestone called.