‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘Of course you’re not.’ She was still wary, aware that the mood Akhtar was in at that moment might not be the same one he would be in five minutes from now, but she needed to do everything possible to keep him where he was. To maintain the calm. ‘ This is hardly… normal, is it?’
Akhtar shook his head, ran a hand slowly across the top of it.
‘One man is already dead, Javed.’
He nodded, solemn. ‘If I was reading about something like this in one of my papers,’ Akhtar said, ‘I would despise the person doing it. I would talk about what was happening with Nadira and in the shop with my customers, and we would all shake our heads and tut-tut and say how disgusting it was, asking ourselves what the world was coming to and so on. I would be thinking about the people being held against their will, nothing else, thinking about their families. I swear to God, I would not give a damn if the man who was doing such things lost his life. I would be happy for the police to do whatever was necessary.’
Helen pointed to Akhtar, then to herself. ‘This… is not you,’ she said.
He asked her if she would like to watch the television for a while, but she said no. Much as she would have appreciated the chance to get lost for a while in something nice and mindless, she thought it was important to keep talking. At least until she was sure things were back on an even keel.
As even as it was ever likely to get, at least.
‘You know, even on that first night when Amin came home, I did not get upset straight away,’ Akhtar said. ‘Nadira went to pieces as you would expect, the sight of all that blood, but I kept it all inside for a while, same as always. Even when I knew what had happened, when I discovered that this other boy was dead, I just thought about it. I was trying to understand, trying to work out what needed to be done and it was like all the emotions I should have been feeling were just laid to one side for later on.’
‘People do that,’ Helen said.
‘When he was killed, I did not even cry like a father should cry for his son.’ He shook his head. His voice had dropped. ‘Can you believe that? I felt ashamed that I was not like my wife, like the rest of the family. Nadira wept enough for all of us of course, rivers of tears, but still… I felt as though I was letting Amin down or something. Like I did not love him as much as I thought.’
‘Someone has to be strong.’
‘I did not feel strong, Miss Weeks,’ he said. ‘I just felt… inhuman.’ He glanced at the gun and sighed, he looked exhausted suddenly. ‘What’s happening now, all these feelings like bolts of lightning, this blackness… I think maybe I am paying the price for what I was like back then. You are paying the price too, and Mr Mitchell.’
He stood up and walked to the toilet, and for a few minutes Helen was forced to listen to him voiding his bowels, shitting like it was water. When he emerged, Helen bit back her disgust and told him that she needed to go too. He took the key to the handcuffs from the tabletop and stepped towards her.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘When Paul was killed.’
Helen wished she had said yes to the television. ‘I was like you,’ she said, eventually. ‘I didn’t cry straight away. I wanted to, I felt like I should be crying, but it just… didn’t happen. I made myself busy. I ran around like an idiot. I was trying to find out why Paul had died.’
‘Yes, you said. This was when you met Mr Thorne.’
She nodded. ‘And I had the baby to worry about. I had Alfie kicking the hell out of me, and I’d spent weeks crying for no good reason anyway because my hormones were all over the place.’
‘You did cry though, eventually?’
‘Eventually.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘What?’
‘Did it feel good, I mean?’
Helen thought about it, tried to remember. ‘Like finally eating something when you’ve been starving. But it tastes foul. Sour.’
‘Because I still haven’t cried for Amin,’ Akhtar said. ‘Not for the right reasons, anyway. Not because I’ve lost a son.’ He leaned towards her and offered the key. ‘There will be plenty of time for that though. In prison, if that is the way this ends.’
Helen said, ‘Yes,’ and took the key, the ‘if’ ringing in her head.
‘Everything is finished one way or another,’ Akhtar said. ‘After what I did to Mr Mitchell.’
‘I’ll tell them what happened.’
He shrugged as though it did not matter. As though he had already resigned himself to life in prison, or worse. ‘I will cry for Amin before this ends,’ he said. ‘I’ll cry for him when I know why.’
FORTY-EIGHT
‘I’m just saying these things because someone needs to,’ Holland told him. ‘That’s all.’
‘Point taken,’ Thorne said.
‘We go in there half-arsed and it goes pear-shaped, Bridges’ defence team will have a field day.’
Thorne drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. ‘Not as much of a field day as the prosecution’s going to have.’ He continued to stare out of the car window, towards the row of houses opposite, the green front door of the run-down Edwardian conversion, the bay window of the ground-floor flat. ‘All the forensics we’ve got… ’
The SOCO who had been running the fingerprints from the Peter Allen crime scene had called Thorne on his way to Hounslow; the address Jonathan Bridges had provided to the DSS when he had last signed on. The officer had been disappointed at coming second to his female colleague, at missing out on the promised bottle of whisky, but Thorne had taken pains to let him know just how grateful he was for the information. If the ADAPT DNA match was unlikely to stand up in court, the fingerprint evidence certainly would.
These, though, were things Thorne would worry about later on.
Right now, he was more concerned with getting the information that might see Helen Weeks and Stephen Mitchell released than he was with putting anyone away for Peter Allen’s murder.
‘Never mind half-arsed,’ Kitson said from the back seat. ‘What if he’s armed?’
Thorne glanced at his rear-view mirror. Kitson was sitting next to DS Sam Karim. ‘Nothing in his record about firearms,’ he said. He thought about the offence of which Bridges had most recently been convicted. ‘Everyone’s wearing stab-vests, right?’
‘It would be nice to know what was waiting for us, that’s all.’
‘If he’s even in there,’ Thorne said. He was almost certain that their prime suspect would not be inside, but he understood Yvonne Kitson’s concerns. She was speaking not just for herself, Holland and Karim, but for the support officers drafted in at short notice. The four other detectives sitting behind them in an unmarked Ford Galaxy and the two more at the back of the house had no knowledge of the connection between Jonathan Bridges and the armed siege in Tulse Hill; no understanding of the urgency or the disregard for standard procedure.
‘Be nice to know that too,’ Kitson said.
‘What do you want me to do, Yvonne?’
‘ Think. Just think.’
Normally, there would have been a careful assessment of the premises front and back. Intelligence would be fed through to the officers on the ground via the kind of technical support that was being employed at Tulse Hill at that very moment. There would have been an open line of communication with senior officers back at headquarters, an adequate briefing and a cordon that amounted to rather more than a panda car parked at either end of the street.
There would not have been a strategy formulated on the hoof.
But Thorne could not afford to waste minutes, let alone hours. ‘I think I’ll just pop across and ring the bell,’ he said.
Holland shifted in the passenger seat. ‘Gives him time to get rid of anything he might not want us to find.’
‘Nobody’s coming up with any better suggestions.’
‘If he is in there, he’s probably off his face anyway,’ Kitson said.
Thorne reached for the radio that was sitting on the dash then opened the door. ‘With a bit of luck, I might not need you lot at all,’ he said.