He understood tough negotiations. He was familiar with the art of the deal. He knew when it was time to thump tables and jut out his manly jaw.
‘We’ll have to see what our lawyer says about that,’ he said.
It was exactly the wrong thing to say to me, it was the wrong button to push, and suddenly I was on my feet with my hands on the lapels of his £3,000 Savile Row suit, dragging him to his feet, fighting the urge to rip his ears off, enjoying the pure terror in his eyes.
And then Anne was on her feet too and shouting my name.
I quickly let him go. Somehow a cup of herbal tea had shattered on the floor.
But nothing had happened.
He had pushed the wrong button but I had never touched him. Well, perhaps just a little bit.
‘Do you think you can bully us, Max?’ Anne’s voice was shaking. ‘Is that what you imagine? That you can intimidate us into going away? You want to punish me, that’s what this is about, isn’t it?’
‘You can kid yourself all you want,’ I said. ‘I bet every absent parent who ever lived kidded themselves in the same way. But you can’t do it, Anne. You can’t walk away from Scout and still pretend to know her.’
Everyone was looking at us, enjoying the show.
The Australian waiter was back, pale-faced with fear.
‘Leave or I’ll call the police,’ he told me.
Anne laughed with mocking contempt. That was one more gesture that I remembered from that other life.
‘Scout stays with me,’ I said.
17
DCI Pat Whitestone held up an evidence bag containing the knife that killed Ahmed Khan and the bright summer sunshine that poured into Major Incident Room-1 glinted on the thick silver blade, and the nickel-plated pommel, and the grip’s gold-etched black swastika on its red-and-white diamond.
‘Apparently it’s the real thing,’ I said. ‘A Hitler Youth Dagger circa 1937; 26.6 centimetres long, 300 grams in weight. The blade has been sharpened quite recently but it’s not a reproduction.’
I had seen hundreds of knives in my job. One night on The Bishop’s Avenue, I had been stabbed with one of them. And as DCI Pat Whitestone stared at the knife inside its evidence bag, the old scar on my stomach throbbed with the memory.
Whitestone stared at the inscription on the blade.
‘Blut und Ehre,’ I said, ‘Blood and honour.’
‘How hard would it have been to kill Ahmed Khan with this knife?’ Whitestone said.
‘Sharpened like that?’ I said. ‘Piercing the subclavian artery with it would take about as much effort as you would need for opening a bottle of wine. As long as you knew what you were doing.’
‘Forensics?’ Whitestone said.
‘No prints on the handle,’ Edie said, looking up from the report on her screen. ‘That was too much to hope for.’
‘Then any sign of the gloves the killer was wearing?’ Whitestone said.
‘Search teams are still looking for gloves, ma’am,’ Edie said.
Whitestone looked at TDC Adams.
‘Lesson for you here, Joy,’ she said. ‘As a general rule, killers don’t take their gloves home for the weekly wash. They ditch them as soon as they can when they leave the crime scene. And – lucky for us – fingerprints can be found on the inside of gloves, but most villains are too stupid to know that. So if we find the ditched gloves then we are likely to find prints inside and – if we catch a break – those prints will be on IDENT1.’
Adams nodded. She got it.
IDENT1 is the database containing the fingerprints of ten million people who have had contact with the law. If Ahmed Khan’s killer had ever been arrested, even if they had never been convicted of anything, then their prints would be on there.
‘Who would have access to a weapon like this?’ Whitestone said.
‘A serious collector,’ I said. ‘You can’t buy them on eBay. Not the real thing.’
Whitestone was still staring at the blade, as if it might reveal its secrets. Inside the evidence bag, the knife was contained in a weapons tube – a hard plastic shell – which was sealed with biohazard tape to prevent contamination of the blood on the blade.
MIR-1 was silent as Whitestone squinted at the Criminal Justice Act label on the evidence bag. The CJA label gave the evidence bag a unique identification number, named the tube station where it was recovered, the name of the CSI who had tagged and bagged it and – most important of all – the chain of custody showing the life of the item from the moment it had been recovered.
‘How many CCTV cameras are on the London Underground, Max?’
‘Over twelve thousand,’ I said. ‘But this is all we have of Ahmed Khan in the last minutes of his life.’
I hit my keyboard and the big HDTV screen on the wall of MIR-1 revealed the black-and-white CCTV image of a tube train pulling into a station.
The time stamp in the right-hand corner showed Sunday’s date and the exact time I had arrived at the station. The doors of the tube train opened and the crowds emerged. I paused the film. Ahmed Khan was clearly visible in the centre of the screen.
‘And this is from the entrance,’ I said.
Another CCTV image appeared, sharper this time, with natural sunlight bursting at the edge of the frame. It was from the camera pointed into the station, recording the emerging crowds.
And now they were running.
There was no sound but some mouths were opened in a scream. I saw my back in the foreground, taking a tentative step forward, then halting – men and women rushing past me, some of them looking back with horror – and then there was Ahmed Khan, staggering towards the exit that he would never reach, the knife sticking out of the point where his neck met his shoulder blade.
‘I reckon he was stabbed on the escalator,’ I said. ‘My guess – he was standing on the right-hand side, tired after working a long shift, looking forward to being home, and the killer was on the left-hand side, walking up, and punched in the blade as he passed.’
‘Witnesses?’ Whitestone said.
‘We’ve got dozens of witnesses who saw him after he was stabbed,’ Edie said. ‘But nobody who saw the knife go in.’
‘Hard to believe,’ Whitestone said.
‘If it was on the escalator then that’s where everyone gets their signal back,’ Edie said. ‘So they missed the murder because they were all looking at their phones.’
Whitestone gently placed the evidence bag on her workstation. The sound of the traffic down on Savile Row drifted up through the open windows.
‘Let me see the graffiti again,’ Whitestone said.
TDC Adams called up a CSI photograph of the piles of planks outside the house on Borodino Street. In a tight close-up, the numbers were revealed.
20:8–11
‘How many people would get that reference?’ Whitestone asked.
Edie shrugged. ‘I knew it was a chapter and verse numbers from the Bible. But I couldn’t have told you it was one of the Ten Commandments.’
I shook my head. ‘Not me,’ I said.
Whitestone looked at Adams.
The silver crucifix around her neck shone against her dark skin. ‘Of course,’ the young TDC said. ‘The Fourth Commandment – Exodus version, not Deuteronomy. The laws God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. How many people would get that reference? There are two billion Christians worldwide and thirty million in this country.’
‘Or it could be a false lead,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I buy it that this is some Bible-basher. Ahmed Khan wasn’t hated because he worked on Sundays. He was hated because his sons were mass murderers.’
‘What about the mouthy guy with the funny haircut who was whipping up the crowd down there?’ Whitestone said.
‘George Halfpenny,’ I said. ‘No criminal record. And I never saw him advocating violence. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t inspire it.’
‘Put Mr Halfpenny down as a TIE subject,’ Whitestone said.