The youngster scowled at Carlyle. ‘Okay, okay, you’re the boss.’ Disappearing inside, he bounced the door closed.
‘Bloody kids.’ Safi shepherded the policeman towards the door. ‘Anyway, if you want to go and have a look at Taimur’s room, help yourself. The stairs are inside, to the left. It’s right at the top.’
Taimur Rage had lived in what might charitably be called a garret at the top of the building. In reality it was a half-completed loft conversion with a lovely view of the discount shopping centre on the south side of the Green. The place looked like it had never been decorated, with a dirty rug covering bare floorboards. Aside from a child’s single bed, there was a small wardrobe, a desk and a chair. Good preparation for living in a cell, Carlyle thought.
Looking around listlessly, he wondered whether it had been worth making the trip across London at all. Safi was right – the place had been stripped of anything of interest. Apart from a well-thumbed copy of Men Only under the bed and two unopened cans of Red Stripe on the desk, all that had been left by the previous visitors – presumably the boys at MI5 – was a poster of a sports car taped to the wall. Never having owned a car in his life, Carlyle had no idea what kind it was. At the same time, he knew an expensive motor when he saw one; it was not the kind of vehicle that a lad like Taimur could ever hope to own, or even take for a test drive.
‘All in all,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘not very al-Qaeda, is it?’ To be fair, the inspector was only too aware that he had no idea what an actual terrorist hideout might look like. At the same time however, he didn’t imagine that it would be like this.
After a desultory glance through the empty wardrobe, he sat on the bed and again checked his BlackBerry. He had a grand total of three new emails, all of which were junk. Deleting each of them in turn, he watched a spider scurry across the floor before flopping back on to the bed and staring at the ceiling, pondering his next move. Should he pick up some groceries in Shepherd’s Bush before he jumped on the tube, or wait till he got back to Covent Garden?
Decisions, decisions.
Making his way gingerly back down the stairs, Carlyle stopped on the second-floor landing. In front of him were two doors, one painted an off-white colour, the other not painted at all. On his toes, he stepped quietly up to the first door and listened, trying to separate out the background noise from the traffic outside from anything that was going on behind the doors. After several seconds he was sure that he could make out no voices, no TV or other signs of life. Carefully, he turned the handle and pushed. The door was locked. He tried the second one and found the same thing. ‘That would explain why Safi was so relaxed about letting me have the run of the place,’ he told himself, ‘if everywhere is locked.’
Back on the ground floor, he found Safi sitting at a table by the door with a cup of tea and a copy of the local freesheet. The kid behind the counter had once again abandoned his position. Aqib, his mate and the girl in the leather jacket had gone; the back booth was now occupied by a couple chatting happily over a pizza.
‘Find anything?’ Safi asked, not looking up.
‘Nah. Like you said, it’s all been cleaned out.’ Carlyle pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘What can you tell me about his friends?’
‘He didn’t have any,’ Safi said firmly.
‘C’mon,’ Carlyle said, failing to keep the irritation from his voice. ‘He must have had some.’
‘Look,’ said Safi patiently, ‘like I told the other guys, he knew a few of the kids that came into the shop, but he never really hung out with any of them.’ Glancing at the couple in the back booth, he lowered his voice. ‘He certainly didn’t belong to any bloody terrorist cell or any nonsense like that.’ The kid behind the counter announced his reappearance by turning up the radio. ‘Mushudur,’ Safi snapped, ‘leave that alone.’ Without acknowledging his boss, Mushudur reduced the volume to a more acceptable level. The owner returned his attention to the policeman. ‘Your mates spend too much time watching Hollywood movies.’
They’re not my mates, Carlyle thought. ‘Anyway,’ he said, moving the conversation along, ‘you don’t seem too stressed by everything that’s happened.’
Returning his attention to the newspaper, Safi carefully turned the page. ‘Look, I told you, the kid’s not been right in the head for a long time. I’m just glad that he didn’t manage to kill anyone.’
‘That remains to be seen.’
‘The guy had a heart attack, right?’ Safi looked back up from his paper. ‘But that was after Taimur had been arrested.’
‘Who knows what the experts might decide in terms of cause and effect. The CPS will offer him some kind of deal, but it may still be in relation to a murder charge.’
‘He wouldn’t have done it.’ Letting his mask slip for the first time, Safi’s face showed the all too familiar strain of an anguished parent. ‘If he’d caught the guy, Taimur wouldn’t have buried that axe in his head. He didn’t have it in him.’
‘We’ll never know one way or the other.’ It irritated Carlyle, the manner in which people would always try and mutate hope into fact. In his own pendantic way, he knew that, obviously, Taimur Rage could have planted his axe in Joseph Belsky’s skull. Would he have done it if the cartoonist hadn’t escaped into his panic room? That could only ever be a matter of speculation. In Carlyle’s book, speculation wasn’t worth anything much.
Safi let out a deep breath. ‘Anyway, whatever happens he can claim diminished responsibility.’
‘Maybe.’ Despite everything, the inspector felt a pang of sympathy for Taimur. Everyone was so keen to write him off as a sad nutter, the lad really didn’t have a hope. ‘It will be a struggle for him in prison,’ he said. ‘You really should go and see him.’
Safi made a face but the inspector sensed that the earlier hostility had dissipated. For whatever reason, the kebab shop owner no longer seemed so annoyed by the policeman’s presence. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s his mother’s job.’
‘Couldn’t the pair of you manage to put on a united front?’ Carlyle asked. ‘Under the circumstances?’
‘Ha.’ Safi tossed the paper on to the table. ‘Have you met Elma?’
‘Not yet,’ Carlyle admitted.
‘What you’ve got to realize is that she is even crazier than he is.’
You married her, Carlyle thought.
‘It wasn’t like that to start with,’ said Safi, as if reading his mind. ‘But after Taimur was born she had a complete personality change. Totally lost the plot.’
‘Ah.’
‘She got religion, big time.’ Safi grimaced at the memory. ‘It was like her brain went completely haywire. In the end, when she did a runner, it was a bit of a relief, to be honest.’
‘So Taimur got into religion from his mother?’ the inspector asked.
Safi looked at him blankly.
‘She exposed him to Islamic fundamentalism?’ The words made him sound like one of those MI5 berks, but he ploughed on. ‘Got him into the life that led him to go after Joseph Belsky with an axe?’
‘Islamic fundamentalism?’ Pushing his chair back against the window, Safi began to laugh. ‘No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong.’
Wouldn’t be the first time, Carlyle thought.
‘Elma is a kind of . . .’ Safi waved his hand in the air as he tried to find the right words, ‘a born again Christian. An evangelist. Started preaching sermons, stuff like that. She has her own church down in South London now, trying to convince people that she can work miracles.’ Seeing the look of confusion on the inspector’s face, he shrugged. ‘I know, I know. There are people who not only believe that rubbish, they’ll pay good money for it.’
‘I thought that kind of thing only happened in America,’ Carlyle said. ‘Still, there are fools everywhere.’
‘That’s true enough. Anyway, the one thing that little Miss Born Again could most definitely not have was a Muslim husband.’ Safi prodded himself in the chest with his index finger. ‘That is to say, me. Not that I was practising or anything, but it sure as shit wouldn’t have looked good on the promotional literature. Anyway, she divorced me for God and I’ve hardly seen her since.’