‘Nothing,’ Rahim said.
‘Not good enough.’
‘ I’m not underage.’
‘You were,’ Thorne said. ‘And so was Amin.’
Rahim stood up. ‘I want you to go.’
‘Considering what you haven’t told your parents, I’m guessing that they don’t know about your arrest.’ Thorne stood up too, stepped towards Rahim. ‘About the drugs.’
‘So tell them,’ Rahim said.
‘I will if I have to.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Yes, you do.’ Thorne stared until the boy’s bravado began to fall away, until his head sank and it looked as though he might drop backwards on to the sofa. Thorne knew that he was being a bully. He had treated killers, rapists, better than this in the past, but then he had been granted the luxury of time, and a team behind him to gather evidence. He looked at the boy’s face and hated himself, but he could not afford to spare anyone’s feelings, and thinking about what Helen Weeks was going through, what Amin Akhtar had suffered, he fought the temptation to push Rahim against one of his tastefully decorated walls and press an arm across his throat until the boy told him what he knew.
‘We went to parties,’ Rahim said. ‘Me and Amin.’
‘What kind of parties?’
‘Parties with men, OK?’ He spat the words out. ‘Like the ones you were talking about. Respectable men.’
‘And these men paid you and Amin for sex?’
Rahim nodded slowly. ‘Some boys did it because they needed drugs, but we just did it for the money. Our parents were not rich, do you understand? Most of the time the men were… clean, and we were looked after.’
Most of the time.
Thorne waited.
‘It was… exciting too,’ Rahim said. ‘We liked it, the fact that we were not like the other Asian kids, spending every minute swotting to be doctors and lawyers and all that. Living to keep their mothers and fathers happy. We were in control, you know?’
‘You really think so?’
‘It felt like that.’
‘Where did these parties take place?’ Thorne asked.
Rahim hesitated. ‘Different places. The City. A penthouse on the river. Highgate sometimes.’
‘I need addresses.’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Tell me about these men, Rahim.’
‘I’ve told you-’
‘You need to give me some names.’
‘No.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Thorne shouted, ‘one of these men might have killed Amin.’
The boy shook his head and kept shaking it, and Thorne’s breathing grew more ragged with every refusal. He knew there was little point in dragging him down to an interview room, with no valid reason to hold him and even less chance of getting the answers he was looking for. Once again, he felt ready and willing to beat the information from him. The bruises would fade a damn sight quicker than grief, and Thorne would live with whatever consequences came his way. Then, as quickly as the urge for violence had come over him, it went again, as Thorne looked into Rahim Jaffer’s eyes and saw that he would be happy to take it.
Would welcome it.
Instead, Thorne lashed out at the brushed chrome shade of the lamp that hung low to the side of him. He sent it swinging and bouncing across the room on its spindly metal neck; the pool of light washing back and forth across the boy’s face as Thorne walked out of the door.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Peter Allen spent a lot more time in the pub these days. He had always liked a drink, but lately it had been less about enjoyment and more like a simple need to get wasted. To sink into the beer or the cider or whatever and lose himself. Ironic, he supposed, considering how he’d earned the money to pay for it.
The Victoria on the Queensbridge Road wasn’t quite his local. That honour belonged to an old man’s boozer that stank of piss and brown ale, so he preferred to walk the extra ten minutes and drink with people who were a bit closer to his own age. Where there was a big TV if there was a match on and something to eat besides peanuts. This place wasn’t flashy like a Wetherspoons or what have you, and Allen guessed it had been there since before he was born, because there were frosted-glass windows and old-fashioned booths that made it feel like you were getting pissed up in a church or something. There were a few stroppy locals who tried to stare you out when you first walked in, but there was usually a decent game of pool to be had, as well as live music some Fridays and a wide selection of fruit machines to pour his shrapnel into.
Best of all, it wasn’t one of those Paddy places with shamrocks and shit everywhere you looked.
He’d started good and early, had a couple of cans at home before he’d gone out. But even after four pints of lager in the Vic, he was still sober enough come eight o’clock to be taking his third straight frame of pool off some shaven-headed squaddie type. The bloke had been winding him up since he walked through the door, looking and smiling and all that, and now Allen was enjoying making him look stupid.
He’d actually lost the first frame when he’d knocked the black in accidentally and was forced to watch as Corporal Cock winked at his slag of a girlfriend in the corner and said, ‘Bad luck, mate.’ Then, it had been a toss-up between breaking his cue across the arsehole’s nose or sharpening his game up, and after thinking through his options Allen had decided to get his own back on the table. He reckoned it was probably the sensible thing to do, considering the terms of his licence. Besides, he knew he could always batter the bloke later on if he lost, or if winning didn’t prove satisfying enough.
He sank the final black nice and slow, and was staring at the squaddie’s pig-ugly girlfriend before the ball even dropped. Giving her a nice, big smile. He winked and said, ‘Bad luck,’ and as he was walking back to the bar, it struck him that he could have been talking about the game, or just saying it was her bad luck to be shacked up with such a loser. A double-meaning kind of thing.
He thought that was pretty clever.
Despite waving a twenty at her for at least half a minute, the snotty cow behind the bar ignored him and carried on gassing with some twat in a suit, so he moved to the other end of the bar and squeezed into the first gap he could find. He started waving his money again, then turned at the sound of a payout on the fruit machine and saw a face he recognised.
‘Oi, knobhead!’
The boy at the fruit machine turned, his eyes cold and dead, then grinned when he recognised Allen, who had raised his arm and was now making wanking gestures. He scooped out his winnings and sauntered across, then, ignoring the angry looks of those he jostled on the way, he pushed through the crowd at the bar to Allen’s side. He held out a fist. Said, ‘What you doing here?’
Allen touched his fist to the boy’s. ‘Just getting hammered,’ he said.
‘Sweet… ’
‘What you drinking?’
He hadn’t been particularly close to Johnno Bridges in Barndale. The kid was a Jock for a kick-off and Allen never really had much to do with the smackheads. On top of that, Bridges only ever hung out with the white kids, and while it wasn’t like Allen was any big fan of the blacks or the Pakis, he’d preferred to give the gangs a wide berth and keep himself to himself. Safer that way in the long run, he reckoned. All the same, Bridges had never seemed like too much of a prick whenever their paths had crossed. That was a pretty decent character reference considering some of the idiots they’d been banged up with and was certainly a good enough reason to buy him a drink.
‘How long you been out?’
Bridges thought about it. ‘Not long after you. Couple of months, whatever.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a string of blue, plastic rosary beads. He dangled them in front of Allen and smiled, showing a row of crooked and missing teeth. ‘Secret signal,’ he said. ‘Come on then, let’s see ’em.’
Allen nodded and produced his own beads from his jacket. All the boys at Barndale had been issued with them and it was accepted that, once released, they would always carry them. It was a way of acknowledging a shared history, establishing trust with one another on the outside.