‘Including you?’
He nodded. ‘I can’t remember anything else, not till…after. Someone said they were going to turn the sprinklers on at midnight, cool everyone down for New Year but I think that was just a rumour.’
‘Do you remember leaving the club?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember anything outside the club?’
‘I’ve tried, there’s nothing.’
‘Do you remember going to the police station?’
He studied his hands. ‘No. The next thing I knew I was waking up, I was cold, I was shaking. There was blood all over my T-shirt and my hands. I thought I’d had a nosebleed.’ He looked at me. ‘It wasn’t my blood, it was Ahktar’s. They asked me all these questions then. I couldn’t tell them anything. They just kept on about Ahktar, what had we argued about? I couldn’t remember anything. In the end, I lost it. I shouted at him: “I can’t fucking remember! Why don’t you ask Ahktar?” One of them stared at me, hard. “We can’t,” he said, “he’s dead.”
I spent another half-hour talking to Luke, going over details, checking names and addresses. I asked him about motives, too – who might have wanted to kill his friend? He hadn’t a clue. Ahktar was bright, popular but not cocky. He used drugs for fun like they all did, but he wasn’t involved in anything criminal. He was an ordinary eighteen-year-old studying for A levels, playing in a band. Just like Luke who was now accused of murder.
Before I left I took him back to the night at the club and asked him to think again of anything he could remember- familiar faces, funny moments, anything. He began to shake his head then hesitated.
‘Emma, Zeb’s girlfriend, she left early. They’d fallen out, I think.’
‘Was that unusual?’
‘No, Zeb is a bit of a…’ I watched Luke struggle to find a word but there was only one would do.
‘Wanker?’ I supplied.
He blushed slightly. ‘Yeah, he goes to the casino, spends a fortune, then he’s borrowing. He’d borrow off Emma and she’d get really pissed off. She’s a nursery nurse, he makes more in a week than she earns in a month. Anyway, she went. And then I saw Zeb, looks like he’s giving Joey D a hard time.’
‘Borrowing money?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear, you couldn’t hear a thing unless someone yelled in your ear. But Zeb had Joey D by the collar and then Joey goes upstairs.’
‘At the time what did you think?’
‘Nothing. Well, Joey can be a pain and I thought Zeb was fed up because Emma had gone and maybe he was taking it out on Joey D. He never knows when to keep a low profile.’
‘Could it have been about drugs? You said Joey had supplied the stuff that night.’
‘Dunno. Maybe. Zeb was well into toot – cocaine,’ he added for my benefit.
‘Did he get it from Joey?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t think so. Just something Ahktar said one time about how much he spent on it and how miserable he still was.’
‘But Joey could have got it for him?’
‘Oh, yeah. Joey’d do anything if he thought it got him in with you. He’s like a little kid really.’
I asked Luke what he’d been told of the sequence of events that night – or what had been implied by the police and the prosecution.
He blew a breath out, shifted in his seat. ‘They reckon I stabbed him. Outside the club, there’s a small alley behind the side entrance, there’s bins there. That’s where they found us. Together,’ he whispered. ‘It’s quiet round there. The taxis and that, the buses, town – it’s all in the other direction.’
‘Who found you?’
‘Dunno, someone rang an ambulance, don’t know who. It was too late for Ahktar.’
‘Were you awake?’
‘No, they couldn’t rouse me.’
‘And the witnesses they’ve got?’
He pressed his hands onto his knees and swayed in the chair ‘They saw me and Ahktar fighting, shouting, they say I had a knife. They say I stabbed him.’ He spaced out his words, trying to hold himself together. ‘I didn’t,’ he insisted, ‘I didn’t.’
But they identified him.
‘Did you have a knife?’
‘No,’ he was emphatic, ‘I’ve never carried a knife. They’re saying I borrowed it or took it, it’s like one Joey D had.’
‘Could Joey have hurt Ahktar?’
‘No, he’s all mouth. He’s no hard man. He’d run a mile.’
‘The knife was there?’
He rolled his eyes back and blinked hard. ‘It was still in him – there was just one wound. My fingerprints were on the knife.’
Even worse. But there was more than one way to get prints on a knife – trying to remove it, for example.
Before I left I asked Luke to keep thinking about that night and stressed that if he remembered any other details, to tell me about them. I had left my card with reception, it would be given to Luke at an appropriate time, presumably once they’d checked it hadn’t been soaked with hallucinogens.
I told him who I planned to talk to and made sure he had no objection to me asking my questions. I also asked him to consider hypnosis. His amnesia, probably due to the cocktail of drink and drugs he’d taken, was a terrible obstacle to his defence. And while information from somebody under hypnosis probably wouldn’t be admitted in court, it could still help me to find witnesses to the crime and might even give a lead as to who’d stabbed Ahktar.
I knew it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility for Luke to have done it, but then it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility for me to win the Lottery. Except I don’t buy tickets. I prefer to work with probabilities. And Luke probably didn’t kill Ahktar. Someone else probably did, and they were escaping detection. The police had enough evidence to believe that a reasonable jury would find Luke guilty. The thought made me uneasy. Much of their case rested on the witnesses they’d got. It was vital I found out what they’d seen and established whether they could have been mistaken or whether I was up to my neck in a lost cause.
I stood up and went to the partition, motioned to the guard who was standing along the corridor.
‘When you see his parents,’ Luke said, ‘will you tell them I’m sorry, tell them I didn’t do it? They think I did. They wouldn’t talk to my dad. Tell them.’
‘I will.’ If they’ll talk to me, I added to myself.
Chapter Six
Every set of lights on the East Lancs Road went red. And there are many sets. I tried not to get tense but the car was hot and my temples were starting to thump. I had a raging thirst. I hadn’t had a drink since breakfast and the smoky air at the Centre had added to my dry mouth. I pulled in at a garage, bought a bottle of mineral water and glugged it all the way to town.
I drove round for almost half an hour before finding a parking space. The cordon still barricaded off Cross Street, Market Street and Cannon Street, and although many of the buses and the Metro Link were now running, the traffic-flow through town was still at a snail’s pace.
Manchester does have some beautiful buildings, and the Central Library is one of them. Like a cross between the Coliseum and the Parthenon, it’s a delight in white marble, albeit smeared with grey from the pollution. It has large round pillars supporting the porch at the front and repeated on a smaller scale around the dome and the upper floors. The libraries inside are circular, light and airy from the glass ceilings. And plastered with notices warning of pickpockets and bag thieves.
I walked up the stairs to the Social Sciences library and headed for the microfiche newspaper archives. The local papers along with the national dailies were all there. I sought out issues from just after New Year. There were no local papers until 2nd of January. Coverage of the murder of Ahktar Khan dominated the headlines. NEW YEAR STABBING TRAGEDY. Ahktar in a classic school-photo pose took up most of the front page. I read the reports, which were sketchy and speculative. I scrolled forward, winding the film on to the next front page. KHAN KILLING – POLICE DENY RACIAL MOTIVE and the next: SCHOOLBOYKILLING – SUSPECT HELD. Later in the week they proclaimed: KHAN MURDER – POLICE CHARGE SCHOOLFRIEND.