Then someone was screaming into their radio for medics.
They were there almost immediately.
Jackson stepped forward and almost casually bounced the butt of his Sig Sauer assault rifle off George Halfpenny’s forehead and hands grabbed him as he sagged to the floor.
He was dragged away.
‘Tell them! Tell them!’ Edward shouted at his remaining brother, his thin arms and wasted legs writhing with anguish.
Richard Halfpenny was still on his knees with his hands in the air, a powerful young man whose strength had been confiscated. He cast an anxious look at the door. He was lost without his big brother.
The flat was quickly cleared and then I was alone with the two brothers.
Richard Halfpenny was still on his knees, hands raised, trying to understand what had happened. Edward was weeping, bent sideways in his wheelchair.
‘Tell them!’ he moaned. ‘Tell them!’
‘You can get up now,’ I told Richard.
He stood up slowly, glancing towards the door.
‘Don’t they have to release him after twenty-four hours?’
‘Not if they plan to charge him with murder,’ I said. ‘And they can hold him for ninety-six hours if they do that.’
‘Edward,’ Richard said gently, placing one of his thick hands on his brother’s shoulder. ‘Please stop crying.’
With some effort, Edward Halfpenny moved his wheelchair closer to the coffee table. He picked something up in his clawed hands. I saw he was fumbling with a phone.
‘Show him, Richard! Show him, show him!’
‘What do you want to show me, son?’ I said.
Richard took the phone from his brother.
He hit some buttons and handed it to me.
‘This is what he wants to show you,’ Richard said.
And I saw George Halfpenny laughing in a swimming pool as he held up his crippled brother on his back in the water. It was a public pool, impossibly crowded in the summertime. They were both laughing.
And even without that same hobo haircut, I thought, you would have known they were brothers.
‘When did Ahmed Khan get topped?’ Richard said. ‘It was Sunday afternoon, right?’
I nodded.
He laughed bitterly.
‘Stupid, stupid coppers,’ he said.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the film there was a time and date stamp.
The date was Sunday.
The time was exactly when I had been waiting outside the underground station for Ahmed Khan to come home.
I closed the phone.
George Halfpenny had the perfect alibi.
He could not have killed Ahmed Khan.
‘George takes Edward swimming every Sunday afternoon,’ Richard said. ‘It’s their time together.’ He looked at his brother in the wheelchair. ‘The doctors and the physios all say that swimming is best for him.’
I looked at Edward Halfpenny. His mouth struggled to form the words, and his head jerked back, pulled by forces that I could not imagine. He struggled to exist inside his skin. And he would always struggle. I knelt by his side, the phone in my fist.
‘We go … swimming,’ Edward said. ‘My brother George works six days a week. But he would never work on a Sunday.’
Down in the street the sirens started, as loud and empty as canned laughter.
22
Only Whitestone was in MIR-1 when I got to West End Central.
‘There’s something you need to see,’ I said.
I had placed the phone in an evidence bag. There was a Criminal Justice Act label on the side, with a unique identification number and my name, rank and the location where the phone had been recovered. I put on a pair of blue nitrile gloves, took out the phone and called up the film of George Halfpenny in the swimming pool with his brother Edward.
Before it had finished, Whitestone had turned away, unimpressed. She settled her spectacles on the bridge of her nose.
‘Is that going to be his alibi?’ she said.
‘You don’t think it’s a pretty good one?’ I said.
‘They’ve always got an alibi,’ Whitestone said. ‘Every villain I ever met. Nobody was guilty. Not one of the dealers, the muggers, the wife-beaters, the pimps – and the murderers, Max. They were all somewhere else.’ She nodded briefly at the phone. ‘It’s good you bagged and tagged it, but let’s see if it stands up for more than five minutes before we make him a free man, shall we?’
I put the phone back in the evidence bag and sealed it.
‘So you think the film is fake?’ I said.
Whitestone shrugged. ‘The film is real. I’ll give him that much. But I think the time and date stamp are likely to be fabricated.’
I shook my head.
‘It’s a perfect alibi and you know it,’ I said.
The anger flared.
‘And has he got an alibi for assaulting a police officer, Max? PC Sykes is in an ICU in an induced coma with a cracked skull and a blood clot on the brain. Does he have an alibi for that, Max?’
Edie and Joy Adams were standing in the doorway.
Both of them had their breakfast with them.
‘Sorted?’ Whitestone said.
‘Ma’am,’ Edie nodded, coming into the room. She watched Whitestone warily for a moment and then gave Joy the nod. The pair of them settled down to some breakfast from Bar Italia.
Nothing much would happen in West End Central for a while.
George Halfpenny was being processed in the custody suite. He would be cautioned, searched, relieved of his possessions, read his rights by the custody officer, fingerprinted, photographed, mouth swabbed and hair root plucked for DNA, visited by the station’s duty solicitor and then, after this initial flurry of activity, all the meticulous, well-oiled bureaucracy of arrest, he would be left to stew in his cell before we got around to questioning him.
‘Is that team of shots still here?’ I said.
‘In the car park,’ Edie said.
So that’s where I went.
Down in the underground car park below West End Central, Jackson’s team of Special Firearms Officers were hanging out behind the back of their jump-off van, all feeling pretty good. Drinking coffee, yakking it up, eating bacon sandwiches, grinning with relief that it had gone down the way it did.
There was a murder suspect in custody, no weapons had been discharged and the only casualty was the uniformed police officer who had got a nasty bang on the head when George Halfpenny decked him. But the job was done and the bacon sandwiches were hot and the sun was shining and nobody was dead.
Jesse Tibbs had a big dopey grin on his bearded face that disappeared when I threw my PASGT helmet at him and knocked his carton of tea all over him. He turned away, cursing, PG Tips dripping down his body armour.
‘Hey, top gun?’ I said. ‘Look at me, top gun, will you? You going to make me crawl, are you? Come on, top gun – let’s see you make me crawl.’
I had my hands around his throat before I was gripped from behind, and my arms locked by my side. What you should always do when someone does that to you is lift your feet off the ground and drop your centre of gravity before throwing your head back in a kind of reverse headbutt that – with a bit of luck – scatters a few of their front teeth to the wind. That always makes them let you go.
But I knew who was pulling me off. And so I resisted the urge.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Jackson snarled in my ear, and I heard years of resentment in his voice, years of it, decades of it, the seasoned bile of brothers.
He dragged me away from Tibbs, still gripping me from behind, my arms still pinned to my side.
‘Ask him,’ I said. ‘Ask your man Tibbs. He reckons he’s going to make me crawl because he blames me for Ray Vann topping himself – don’t you, top gun?’
Tibbs delicately shook his arm, sending off a spray of English Breakfast tea.
‘You know what you did,’ he said darkly.