The young man kneeling on the middle of the carpet in the little room which served as the Shiite mosque of Shadwell Road looked slight and vulnerable in his white T-shirt and jeans. In the lobby outside, above his grey trainers, a dark coat hung from a peg. It looked to Brock very much like the coat they had seen on the assassin in the security film, but there was no weapon in its pockets, or on the person of Abu, who submitted to his arrest without surprise or resistance.
Umm Kalthoum’s song throbbed plaintively in the deserted cafe as they led the young man out into Chandler’s Yard. The rain had stopped, leaving puddles on the cobbles. There was no one in the dark square or laneway, but beyond they could see many figures moving about under the brighter streetlighting of Shadwell Road.
‘Let’s make this quick,’ Brock said, and they hurried forward, each gripping one of the lad’s elbows, his wrists cuffed together at his back. It wasn’t until they were practically out into the main street that they realised that the people there were waiting for them. They stopped abruptly as the crowd recognised the detectives and cries went up, ‘Here they are! Here, here!’ Brock recognised faces from the Twaqulia Mosque, eager, excited, among the people pressing forward to see who they had brought out of the yard.
‘Let’s keep moving,’ he murmured, and they stepped forward again, holding Abu tight between them. As they passed the corner entrance of The Three Crowns they saw the doors were open, a group of pale-faced young men standing against the light, shaved heads. One of them shouted, ‘Hello, Abu!’ and Abu twisted between the detectives to try to see who had called his name. Others from the doorway joined in, right arms raised, their yells becoming a chant, ‘Aaa-booo, Aaa-booo.’ Brock saw alarm growing on the faces of the crowd from the mosque as the chanting youths fell into step behind them. The crowd wavered as Brock and Bren pressed forward, stepping out into the roadway, then they heard a scream and a running of feet from behind a group of turbaned men ahead. The men turned and began to scatter and in a sudden clatter of boots more skinheads were bursting through from the front. One was swinging something, an axe handle or a baseball bat, others throwing punches and now everyone was shouting and screaming and running. Bren swore, his arm raised to block a blow as they charged on, almost lifting the man between them off his feet in their effort to keep their momentum. Brock felt a numbing blow to his knee, hands grabbing at his arm trying to drag him down, a boot flailing past. Then more shouts and he glimpsed the entrance to the police station ahead and uniformed men running out, batons in their hands. A scream of pain very close to his left ear, then a surge as they stumbled clear and hands were hauling them inside. Bren was shouting something. ‘Made it… bloody made it…’ But Brock was too winded to speak, his ears singing, and it was a moment before he realised that their prisoner was lying face down on the floor between them, not moving.
They rode together in the ambulance, the three of them, Brock, Bren and Abu, but the young Lebanese was dead before they reached the hospital, two deep stab wounds in his back. Apart from these almost invisible wounds he was unblemished, in contrast to the other two who were battered and bloody.
It was several hours before Kathy was able to see either of them. She sat in the casualty waiting room, watching the staff process a motorbike accident case, an asthmatic child, two men hurt in a pub fight, a coronary victim, and decided that there were worse things than being a copper. It was exactly a month since she’d lain on a bed in a place just like this, waiting to be treated. The harsh lighting, the smells, the sense of an invisible but relentless process, all seemed designed to bring home the reality of the fragility of life. Here all the comforting little props and reassurances of normal routine were stripped away. You came here damaged, hoping to be saved and put together again.
She had seen it all from an upstairs window of the police station, from an office where they had the computer link to CRIS, the Crime Report Information System, which she was trying to trawl for information about Abu Khadra. In truth she’d gone there to keep out of the way while Leon Desai was around, an absurd and unnecessary reaction since he’d made himself scarce immediately after their encounter. The fact was that his vulnerability and her reaction to it had shaken her. She had never seen him off-balance like that before, and her response had been so hostile because she had felt herself being touched by it. She realised that she was tempted to think back again over the time they had spent together before Christmas, to pick over the memories of what for a few short days had seemed euphoric, to find new, more forgiving interpretations of their split. And she was resolved not to do that. She had decided on a fresh start, and that was that.
So she’d bashed another spelling of ‘Khadra’ into the machine and sat back and stared out of the window at the unexpectedly crowded street. Then she’d seen Brock and Bren emerge at the corner of the pub with the slender young Arab held tight between them. She saw him raise his head just once and turn towards some men who were following them, skinheads dressed in army fatigues, who seemed to be chanting and waving. Then he turned back, his head bouncing as the two big men broke into a jog, and the crowd parted in front of them, people scattering in all directions, and six or seven men, looking almost like a single flailing animal, charged directly at them from the front. For a second the impact brought the three of them to a halt, but then they recovered and heaved forward again, lashing out with fists at their attackers who slithered round their flanks.
A nurse finally called Kathy and led her down a corridor to a small ward where she pulled back a curtain to reveal Bren sitting looking glum and alone. His right eye was covered by a large gauze pad, his mouth swollen and bruised, his right hand bandaged and in a sling.
‘Oh, hello, Kathy,’ he said disconsolately.
‘Bren! How are you?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m fine. Nothing worse than a match against the All Blacks.’
‘That’s a miracle. I thought you’d both be dead.’
‘You saw it?’
‘Yes, from the office upstairs at the station. You were both fantastic.’
Bren looked down at his bandaged hand and sniffed modestly. ‘We’d have been kebabs if we’d been twenty yards further from the station or the lads had been slower coming out for us.’ He grinned reluctantly. ‘The boss did all right, though, didn’t he? Like an old warrior. He clocked the guy with the pickaxe handle, did you see that? Knocked him out cold.’
‘Where is he?’
‘They’re worried about his left knee. It took a bashing. They’re doing some more X-rays. But that’s not what’s pissing him off. It’s what happened to the Arab kid. He’s dead, Kathy.’
‘I know.’
Bren shook his head in disbelief. ‘When we got him into the station I couldn’t believe our luck. He looked completely untouched. It must have been those bastards behind us, from the pub. Did you see it happen?’
‘No. I wasn’t aware of anything like a knife. They’re hoping a street camera might have picked something up.’
‘How did they all appear like that, out of nowhere? And how did they know his name, Kathy? That’s what I can’t fathom.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Those fucking Nazis, they knew Abu’s name. They were chanting it as they came out the pub.’ He wearily rubbed the unbandaged parts of his face with his good hand. ‘On the way here in the ambulance, Brock was going on about how he’s never lost a prisoner. He’s really cut up about it. Hell, me too.’
‘Yes.’ She could imagine the feelings of outrage and dismay the two of them must feel at having failed to protect the helpless Abu. And there would be ramifications. While she had been sitting outside in the waiting room, Kathy had recognised a plain-clothes officer who had come in and stood waiting at the information desk. At first she couldn’t place him, and had assumed he must be following up on one of the other cases, the motorbike accident or the pub fight. But as he turned from the counter and walked away she remembered him, an inspector in the Crime Support Branch, which watches over the performance of the other specialist operations groups, such as their own Serious Crime Branch. And it had come home to her how completely Abu Khadra’s death changed everything. Now Brock and Bren were no longer simply investigating officers, but were themselves witnesses and participants in a murder. Herself too perhaps? Would she now be isolated and corralled while a new major inquiry squad took over? Then again, she was on leave. Strictly speaking, in this investigation she didn’t exist at all.