‘Is that Mrs Khan?’ DS Stone said.
I stared hard at the monitor. The photographs I had seen of Mrs Azza Khan revealed a sturdy, fierce-faced woman. I could not see the face of the person leaving the house but they had feet like landing craft. And those feet were wearing Doctor Martens boots.
‘That’s a man,’ I said.
Then DS Stone kicked the back doors open and she was jumping out the back of the van.
‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still! Show me your hands!’
The figure in the niqab brought his hands out from inside the billowing niqab. He was holding some kind of assault rifle.
And he shot DS Alice Stone in the head.
The SFOs were all screaming the same thing as they piled from the van.
‘Shots fired! Officer down!’
‘Shots fired! Officer down!’
‘Shots fired! Officer down!’
The burst of automatic gunfire seemed to crack the day wide open.
All of the firearms used by the Metropolitan Police are configured to not fire on semi-automatic, meaning every single trigger pull fires only one single shot and later that shot has to be justified to people who never heard a shot fired in anger in their life, except possibly on the grouse moor.
So that unbroken burst of automatic gunfire from the figure wearing the niqab was not merely deafening.
It froze the blood and scrambled the senses.
Because police gunfire never sounds like that.
Only enemy gunfire sounds like that.
Then the last of the shots were barging past me as I climbed from the back of the van.
‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’
‘Stop! Armed—’
One of the shots banged into me so hard that I tumbled from the pavement to the gutter and almost fell. Then I looked up. The veil had fallen away and I was staring at the bearded face of Asad Khan, the older of the two brothers.
I watched him raise his assault rifle, a fifty-year-old Heckler & Koch G3. He pointed it at the nearest SFO and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He stared at his elderly weapon. People were screaming. I looked down and saw the lifeless body of DS Alice Stone crumpled half on the pavement and half in the road. A halo of blood was growing around her PASGT helmet.
Khan fired again.
And this time the sound split the sky, made your ears ring, and promised death. The burst of gunfire made a ferocious tattoo on the side of our van. I looked at it and saw the holes punched in the metal all along the legend ‘Beautiful’ Blooms of Barking.
‘Armed police!’ Jackson was shouting. ‘Drop the weapon and show me your hands!’
I looked up and watched Jackson Rose aim his Heckler & Koch at Asad Khan.
The gunman’s rifle was held almost casually at his side, as if he had injured his arm or was in a state of disbelief at what was happening.
He started to raise his G3 and Jackson shot him.
SFOs are trained to aim at the centre of mass – the largest part of the body, the torso, the centre of the chest, the largest target. They are not trained to kill. They are trained to hit the target. Jackson’s single shot threw its target backwards, the muzzle blast flashing yellow.
The old assault rifle clattered in the gutter next to Asad Khan.
‘Suspect down!’ somebody screamed.
Two SFOs were on their knees by the side of DS Stone. Her blood soaked the grey leggings of their body armour.
Jackson took two paces forward and leaned over Asad Khan.
I called his name. ‘Jackson!’
And then Jackson shot him again.
Another muzzle flare.
He looked at me calmly.
The front door was open and SFOs were pouring inside.
‘Armed police!’
‘Armed police!’
‘Armed police!’
Then Jackson barged past me, his mouth twisted with rage.
‘Let them stick that in their report,’ he said.
An ambulance was already hurtling down the street, blue lights blazing and siren howling.
A female SFO was crouched by the body of Asad Khan, attempting to stop the blood pouring from his chest. They try to kill and then we shoot them, but after that we try to save their lives. This is what we do, I thought.
This is who we are.
I looked at the face of DS Alice Stone and I felt my throat close tight.
The two SFOs with DS Stone were talking to her but I realised with a jolt of shock that they were administering to the dead.
And then I went inside the house.
The light immediately went out in the narrow hallway and I could hear SFOs screaming in the dark. I banged my bad knee against a box and winced with pain. I realised the hallway had one of those lights that go out automatically, the kind they have in cheap property where someone who doesn’t live there is worried about the energy bills. I fumbled on the wall, found the round switch and hit it. The musty yellow light came back on and I could not understand what I was looking at.
There were boxes all the way down the dingy hallway.
Drones.
Dozens of them. Some of them unopened. Some of them scuffed with dirt and grass, the metal scarred from repeated crash landings.
The SFOs seemed to be above me now, on the first and second floors.
I walked to the end of the corridor and opened the kitchen door.
A child screamed.
Shrill, high-pitched, full of terror.
No, not quite a child. But not yet fully grown. A teenage girl of about sixteen was cowering on the floor by the oven with a woman and a man around sixty. The woman and girl were in their pyjamas. The man, his hair grey and thinning, was in a London Transport uniform.
They were, I realised, Ahmed ‘Arnold’ and Azza Khan, the parents of the brothers, and Layla, their granddaughter, the daughter of their third son who had died in Aleppo.
‘Papa-Papa!’ Layla cried, and at first I fought she was calling for her dead father. ‘Papa-Papa! Papa-Papa!’
But she turned her terrified face to her grandfather and I saw that she was talking to him.
‘Don’t kill us!’ Mrs Khan begged me as she clung to her granddaughter and they both closed their eyes.
At their feet there was a pink and purple rucksack with The Angry Princess on the side. It was exactly the same as the one I had been sent to the shopping centre to replace.
‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘You’re safe now. But you must go – go immediately.’ I helped them to their feet. ‘And when you come out of the front door – this is very important – hold your hands above your head with the palms showing.’ I demonstrated. ‘Like this. It’s very important that they can see the palms of your hands, OK? Then nobody will hurt you.’
They copied me. The woman snatched up her granddaughter’s Angry Princess rucksack and threw it over her shoulder.
And then they ran, their hands in the air before they were out of the kitchen, palms forward as I had shown them.
I walked from the kitchen, my balance off from what the gunfire had done to my inner ear, and I noticed for the first time that there was a basement door facing the entrance to the kitchen. From the bottom of the stairs, a dim light was shining.
I went down the stairs, shouting my name and rank.
In the basement there was an SFO with his assault rifle at his shoulder. It was the shot who DS Stone had addressed in the back of the van.
You OK, Raymond?
And before him there was a man on his knees.
It was the other brother, the youngest one. Adnan Khan, with his hands in the air. I looked at his palms expecting to see hand grenades but his hands were empty. The SFO glanced at me and then back at the brother on his knees. Adnan Khan was surrendering.