‘Why?’
‘I want a man,’ she swivelled her shoulders, ‘not a boy. Read what’s left.’
While she sorted the meal out I read out the five remaining entries. We got giggly reading between the lines. They all sounded inoffensive; one or two were more interesting. One was a keen gardener.
‘You see,’ she pointed at me with the serving spoon, ‘he might be able to help you with your pruning.’
‘Ha ha.’
She brought in the main course. A glistening Spanokapita, spinach, curd cheese and nuts in a delicate filo pastry, baby new potatoes and a crunchy sprouted salad. Our conversation lulled while we piled up our plates.
‘It’s wonderful,’ I told her.
‘You busy?’
‘Yes, all of a sudden.’ I told her about my week, the gruesome discovery at Mr Kearsal’s, the press follow-up. The bomb.
‘I felt it here,’ she said, ‘the blast. I felt the windows move.’ She shook her head. ‘I hated that building, but…’
We were quiet for a moment, the atmosphere in the room suddenly charged with emotion.
I talked to her about the two cases I now had. I know I can trust her not to gossip to anyone else about my work.
Some more wine, some apricot fool and some fierce coffee, and it was time for home. I cycled back slowly. It was cloudy, no stars to gaze at, but the gardens were full of night scents; sweet stocks, the tang of honeysuckle, heady tobacco plants. Cats were out and about, darting across the roads, creeping under hedges. I passed a dead hedgehog. There wasn’t much traffic on the side roads and I could drop my guard and relish the sensation of the air on my face and the tingle in my leg muscles as I built up speed.
Chapter Nine
The two witnesses who had allegedly seen Luke Wallace stab Ahktar Khan were Sonia and Rashid Siddiq. They lived in Whitefield not far from Prestwich in one of those new townhouse developments. Tall, thin houses with integral garages clustered round a central courtyard. Two or three-bedroomed properties, twenty of them, each with a tiny spit of land smaller than the old back yards of the redbrick Manchester terraces. There were plenty of olde-worlde features to distract from the economies of scale; mullioned windows, carriage lamps, wood stained fencing, studded doors. But this was the end of the twentieth century, and each house sported a burglar alarm and a satellite dish.
There was a car parked in the driveway of number 18 – a smart white Saab. The lion’s-mouth door-knocker made a frightful din that echoed round the courtyard. Most houses looked deserted, their owners out at work. A woman at the far end was loading small children into a hatchback.
I was about to knock again when the door opened, just a few inches.
‘Mrs Siddiq?’
She was young. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Yes?’
‘My name is Sal Kilkenny, this is my card.’ I passed it to her. ‘I’m a private investigator.’
She examined the card carefully as if it could reveal the nature of my enquiry.
‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
‘What’s all this about?’ she snapped.
‘You witnessed an attack on Ahktar Khan.’
She blanched. What else did she think a PI would be calling on her for?
‘I’ve already told everyone about that. The police, the lawyers.’ She made a move to shut the door.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘I need to know what you saw. I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.’
She hesitated. I took the chance to keep talking.
‘I’m sorry to ask you to go over it all again; it must have been very traumatic, but your evidence is crucial. And whatever happened, my client has the right to a fair hearing. It’s my job to go over all the evidence and talk to all the witnesses.’
I wasn’t getting anywhere. She tried to close the door again.
‘Has someone been threatening you?’ I asked gently. ‘If anyone’s put you under any pressure not to talk I’d be expected to notify the police.’ Not strictly true but it certainly rang bells for Sonia Siddiq.
She swallowed and stood back. ‘No, nobody has. It’s just so horrible, like you say.’
The lounge was at the end of the small hallway. It was dominated by several intricately designed rugs on both the walls and the floor, and by a large white leather couch and matching armchairs. An old-fashioned elaborately carved sideboard was covered in silver-framed photographs, candelabra and statuettes. One corner of the room held the consumer durables; CD midi system, video and television.
The armchair crackled under me. Mrs Siddiq perched on one end of the sofa. She was slightly built, which added to the impression of youth. She wore shalwar kameez in a soft caramel colour with silver threads around the borders. Her hair was shoulder-length; silver globe earrings hung bright in her ears.
I asked her to tell me everything she could remember from New Year’s Eve.
‘We were going home, we’d been in the club. We’d parked in a side street round the back.’
‘Who was driving?’
I wanted to establish whether the Siddiqs had been sober that evening, how reliable they were as witnesses.
She looked puzzled. ‘I was.’ But she didn’t sound very certain.
‘Had you had anything to drink?’
‘I don’t drink.’
I nodded.
‘As we came round the corner, there were these two lads arguing and one of them, he had a knife.’
‘You could see the knife?’
‘Yes, it was quite big. And the other one kicks out and the lad with the knife screams like he’s hurt, and then he swings the knife up and they both fall over.’ She was disturbed by her recitation; her fingers knotting round themselves, her words breathy.
‘What happened then?’
‘Excuse me.’ She rooted in the sideboard and found what she was looking for, a book of matches, a cigarette.
‘Rashid doesn’t like me to smoke,’ she shrugged her shoulders, ‘although he smokes all the time.’ She dragged on the cigarette as if she’d suck all the tobacco out, pulling the smoke in deep and holding her breath before releasing it through her nose. I could recall from my own distant past the gloriously dizzying effect of the nicotine as it charged round the system, the buzzing at the back of the neck, the satisfying hit on the throat.
She took another drag.
‘We went home.’ She spoke with smoke in her lungs.
I stared at her.
She exhaled. ‘It’s shameful, I know. We were…I was frightened to get involved. They were drunk, there was a knife, anything could have happened.’
Anything did. Ahktar died.
‘You didn’t ring for an ambulance?’
‘I wish I could say different.’ She lowered her voice, ‘Rashid said someone else would get an ambulance or call the police. I think maybe the shock…’ She broke off. There could be no justification.
‘But you did contact the police?’
‘The next day, the day after. We heard that he’d died and-’
‘Ahktar?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him?’ I asked.
She stared at me. ‘No, no.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘I didn’t know him. We never knew him.’
‘I thought perhaps from the club…?’
‘No, I’m sure. Neither of us knew him.’ She was rattled. Understandable. Bad enough to walk on by while someone bleeds to death; even worse to think you might have known them.
‘How did you hear?’ I asked her.
‘Sorry?’
‘About the death. There weren’t any papers on New Year’s Day.’
She paused. ‘The radio, there was something on the radio.’
‘OK. So you went to the police on New Year’s Day?’
‘Yes.’ She took another long drag on the cigarette. ‘We told them what we’d seen and they arranged an identity parade.’