He left us, and with an apologetic smile, Ahmed Khan joined Sir Ludo and his well-spoken helpers at the dining table. They were young, eager, hard-working and totally in thrall to their famous master.
The YouTube film was still running on Joy’s laptop.
I could hear the anger of the mob and I could feel their appetite for blood.
‘What’s the drill?’ Edie said. ‘When someone wants to return home to the scene of a serious crime? To somewhere like Borodino Street?’
I shook my head. There is no drill, Whitestone had told me on the Thames Path. Suddenly I was very tired.
‘If it is no longer a crime scene, and if Mr Khan wants to go home, then we can warn him, and we can advise him against it and we can hope that he uses common sense,’ I said. ‘But we can’t stop him.’
‘That selfish, stubborn old bastard,’ Edie said. ‘It’s not just him going back there, is it?’
And on the other side of that safe house, Layla Khan pushed back her long black hair from her face, looked across at Edie, and I saw her smile for the first time.
13
The noise on a firing range mangles your senses.
The close proximity of continuous live gunfire is the opposite of deafening. When you stand in one of the booths at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Gravesend, Kent, discharging live rounds from a Glock 17, your inner ear does not miss a thing. You feel every shot being fired in your nerve ends. You can hear everything. You can hear the blood in your veins.
Despite the ear and eye protection that we all wore inside our booths, insulating every shooter into his or her own little world, a world that narrows down to you and your gun and your target, and despite every effort to muffle the murderous racket with high, thick panels that divide the shooters, every shot fired seemed to find its own echo somewhere in the back of my brain.
The eye protection that I wore to protect me from flying fragments of spent brass steamed up every few minutes with a fine film of mist. Again and again, I had to – very carefully – place the Glock 17 on the counter before me and swab off the foggy lenses before I picked up the gun and aimed again at the target twenty-five metres away.
‘It’s amazing how many gun club civilians shoot at a target that is way over twenty-five metres away,’ Jackson said, having to raise his voice above the muffle of the headphones. ‘You try explaining in a court of law how you shot someone in self-defence who was twenty-five metres away. Good luck with that. This distance is good practice for your hand and eye. But if you want real world, then bring the target in to ten metres or less. That’s where they are going to be when you want to make them think again.’
I had heard many shots fired in anger. But that was always sporadic firing that seemed to come out of nowhere, and although it cracked open the very air, it was over before your mind had a chance to register what had just happened. This was different. This was a universe of gunfire. And as I learned to rack the slide back to check the firearm was unloaded, as I learned to load the magazine, and to grip the gun, and to keep my finger off the trigger until I was ready to shoot, I also had to learn to control my heart.
Jackson was having a wonderful time.
We had always been as competitive as brothers, and as he stood with me in the firing booth, his hands sometimes running over the stubby black Glock like a virtuoso tuning an instrument for a novice student – showing me the correct technique for loading or dropping a magazine, demonstrating his steady and unwavering grip, telling me how to pass him a loaded Glock without pointing it at his head – through the nerve-jangling mist that steamed up my eyewear, I saw him smiling with gappy-toothed delight.
‘Centre of mass,’ he said. ‘Think about that, Max. We are training to shoot at the largest part of the body – the torso. We are not learning to kill here. We are learning how to hit our target.’
I spent an hour emptying the Glock at paper targets – a bullseye on a black-and-white image of an armed man’s torso. But the actual act of shooting was a tiny part of the lesson, seconds of murderous noise between the longer minutes of learning how to handle my firearm. Jackson talked me through the grind of manually loading the Glock, pushing the full-metal jacket cartridges into the magazine, the rear of the bullet towards the back of the gun, the act becoming physically harder as you loaded more bullets, as if warning of the seriousness of this enterprise.
‘There’s a speed clip for loading but you should know how to do it yourself,’ said my teacher.
Jackson was a patient and good teacher, completely comfortable with a loaded gun in his hands, and always alert when that loaded gun was in mine.
After an hour I left him to it – his aim steady, his demeanour calm as gunfire carved a large black hole in the centre of a target – and I went off to the locker room, sticky with nervous sweat and looking forward to a shower.
The Gravesend training centre was huge, like an abandoned small town, or a large film set. There were make-believe streets with shops, pubs and houses, the carriage of a tube train and the fuselage of a plane.
The live-fire ranges included areas for shotguns, rifles and handguns, like the one where I had left Jackson. The crack and pop of live ammunition filled the air as officers made their way to lecture rooms.
Everywhere teemed with life and action and noise.
But the locker room was silent and empty apart from Ray Vann.
He gave me a tired smile when I walked in. He looked as though he had not slept since the day we went into Borodino Street. I sat down on the bench beside him, remembering Alice Stone singling him out in the jump-off van on the day that she died.
You OK, Raymond?
‘You’ve been shooting with Jackson?’ he said.
‘He’s trying to teach me,’ I said. ‘But it’s hard. I can’t imagine what it’s like in a live situation. Someone shooting back at you, lousy visibility, your blood pressure off the scale.’
He gave me a rueful smile.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s even harder.’
We sat in silence.
‘The IPCC interviewed me about Borodino Street,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘I wish I could help you more, Ray. But there’s no more I can do.’
I’m not going to rat him out, I thought.
But I am not going to lie for him.
‘I appreciate what you’ve done,’ he said, not looking at me. Eye contact seemed difficult for him. Today and every day. ‘You’ve done enough for me, Max.’
He said it without any bitterness or sarcasm.
‘How’s it going?’ I said.
‘Fine,’ he said, when it was anything but fine. ‘Jackson told you, I guess – me and him, we were both temporarily suspended because we discharged our weapons. We were both boarded.’
Boarding meant they had gone before an interview board of senior officers on the top floor of New Scotland Yard to justify their actions.
‘But Jackson is going back on active duty. There’s even talk of him getting the QPM.’
The Queen’s Police Medal is awarded to serving police officers for gallantry or distinguished service.
‘And I’m not getting a medal,’ Ray Vann said. ‘But I might get jail time for unlawful killing.’
‘Ray,’ I said, with more conviction than I felt. ‘That’s not going to happen. They’re not going to do you for unlawful killing. Adnan Khan was a mass murderer. He was a stone-cold killer. He was a terrorist. Adnan and his brother brought down that helicopter over Lake Meadows. His brother murdered Alice Stone. Adnan Khan was not an innocent man.’
‘I’ve been removed from operational duty,’ he said, not hearing me, or perhaps unable to believe me. ‘There’s evidence of unlawful conduct, see, in the trajectory of the GSW.’
Gunshot wound.
‘You see, Max, they don’t quite buy my line that he was going for a weapon – or maybe those hand grenades that we heard so much about.’ He stared at the floor. ‘The IPCC have put it to me that I shot Adnan Khan when he was on his knees and attempting to surrender himself to my custody,’ he said. ‘And even if I don’t get done for unlawful killing, there’s talk that this big shot human rights lawyer –the one with all the silver hair? – will bring a civil case against me if the IPCC decide that it was a lawful killing. And then there’s the DPS.’