‘It’s OK,’ Pascoe said. ‘Just keep talking to him.’
They spoke for several minutes more. Akhtar did most of the talking, shouting at first, then growing calmer as he said the same thing over and over, while his wife tried and failed to interject, until eventually she gave up and began to weep.
When Akhtar ended the call, Pascoe took the phone and stood up to put an arm around the woman’s shoulders. She looked at Donnelly as she told her how well she had done, while Nadira shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Donnelly nodded the translator across, but Nadira waved her away. She wanted to tell them herself.
‘He says he loves us all very much and that he’s sorry.’ She fought back a sob. ‘This is for Amin, he says. All for Amin. He says that he owes it to him to do this.’ She lowered her head. ‘He is happy to offer his life back to Allah if need be, but he has no choice. Everyone’s life… ’
The tears came again and she made no effort to stop them. Donnelly quickly beckoned the WPC who was working as family liaison officer to escort her away. Nadira turned to say sorry one more time as she was led from the hall, but Donnelly, Pascoe and Chivers had already moved into a huddle.
‘I didn’t like the sound of that last bit,’ Chivers said. ‘Offering his life back. Heard that a few too many times.’
‘He’s not a terrorist,’ Pascoe said.
‘Isn’t he?’
Donnelly raised his hands and tried to speak, but Pascoe was not about to let Chivers have the last word.
‘He’s just a father who’s lost his son, so let’s not go throwing labels around.’ Her responsibility as a negotiator began and ended with the safety of the hostages. That meant maintaining an atmosphere of calm and making sure that nobody – fellow officers included – got over-excited.
Chivers made no attempt to hide a sneer. Donnelly asked both of them if they had quite finished. Pascoe – calling on every ounce of training and experience when it came to reading people and making judgements about personality and state of mind – decided that Chivers was a twat.
‘Right… ’ Donnelly said.
They all turned at the sound of raised voices in the corridor, and moved quickly when somebody screamed and what sounded like a full-blown slanging match began to erupt. Donnelly led the way, charging out of the hall and towards the classroom that had been set up as a family liaison area.
They entered the classroom to see a WPC struggling to hold back a young black woman who was raging at a terrified Nadira Akhtar. She called her a bitch and swore that if anything happened to her husband, she would make her and her family pay for it.
Donnelly shouted, demanding to know what was going on.
‘Sorry, sir.’ The red-faced WPC finally managed to gain some control over the woman. ‘This is Stephen Mitchell’s wife. I didn’t know where else to put her.’
Pascoe took Nadira’s arm and led her from the room. Chivers raised an eyebrow and followed them.
Donnelly glared at the WPC. ‘Nice job,’ he said.
SIXTEEN
When Thorne eventually got to the library, he spread the files out across a table in the corner and spent fifteen minutes tracing Amin Akhtar’s journey, from first court appearance to funeral.
As was the case with all young offenders sent down from the Old Bailey, Amin had been transferred to Feltham YOI, the same place in which he had spent five months on remand after his arrest. From there, he was eventually assigned to Barndale to serve what would be the first half of his eight-year sentence, before moving into the adult prison system.
Despite the circumstances of the offence and the nature of the boy who had committed it, the court had handed down a sentence at the high end of the scale. It had clearly been Amin’s misfortune to come up in front of a judge determined to be tough on knife crime. Even so, it was little wonder that Amin’s legal team had spent six months mounting a vigorous appeal, which would now of course never be heard.
Arguably, Helen Weeks was now a victim of that same misfortune.
Thorne made a mental note to talk to Amin’s solicitor and sent Brigstocke a text asking him to get hold of the phone number.
He looked up from the paperwork at the sound of laughter from two boys huddled around a computer at the far end of the library. Along with an older boy who sat engrossed in a book near the door, they were the only inmates in the place and thankfully seemed uninterested in Thorne’s presence. The boys at the computer giggled again and the female PO at the desk raised her eyes from a copy of Closer. Told them to keep the noise down.
Thorne guessed that Amin Akhtar had spent a good deal of time in this room that smelled of polish and something else. Damp, perhaps. He opened the police report and took out the photographs of the boy’s body that lay on top of the file; the lips drawn back across the teeth, the blood caked around his chin and dried like streaks of rust on his neck.
He wondered what kind of books Amin had liked to read.
Once Thorne had done some reading of his own, it became clear that the original investigation had – with one notable exception – been less sloppy than he had initially feared. Dawes had done just about all that was required of him to ascertain that there had been no suspicious circumstances around the sudden death of Amin Akhtar.
He had reviewed the CCTV footage and asked all the right questions about keys. He had looked at the possibility that the drugs taken by Amin had been brought in from outside the hospital wing and interviewed the boy who had visited him. He had even checked the plastic cup found on the floor of the room for fingerprints. Only Amin’s and those of the PHO who had given him his final dose of meds had been found.
Dawes had also taken statements from all the patients on the two wards the night that Amin had died. Eleven boys from across the three prison sites with a variety of conditions and dependencies; a few with broken bones and several recovering from minor operations performed at the local hospital.
Predictably, none had seen or heard anything. Having seen how drugged-up many of the patients currently in residence were, Thorne was almost tempted to believe the statements, but he had to agree with Dawes’ assertion that looking for witnesses was a lost cause.
Something was still missing though.
Thorne looked through the report one more time. There was no reference anywhere to the thefts from the dispensary, or the possibility that one of them had been the source of the Tramadol that had killed Amin.
Not quite a job well done then, but one with a nice neat line drawn under it nonetheless, ensuring a speedy resolution to the formalities that followed.
Based on the information he had gathered, Dawes had come to a perfectly reasonable conclusion, and with a post-mortem to support it, the coroner would have been happy enough to release the body to the family for burial within a few days. In the apparent absence of any new evidence, the formal inquest that had taken place a fortnight ago would have been straightforward enough. There was little reason for the jury to deliver any other verdict than the one it did. No reason to harbour doubts, or for anyone to take the concerns of a grief-stricken father seriously.
But now, Thorne had a few concerns of his own.
There were others he needed to talk to, of course, and perhaps it was all because he wanted to find something he could take back to Javed Akhtar. To give Amin’s father what he was asking for and get Helen Weeks out of that shop in one piece. Perhaps Holland had been right and Thorne was looking for a murder where there was none…
He closed the file when he saw the two boys get up from the computer and start walking towards him. He slid the photographs underneath.
‘You the one asking questions about the kid that topped himself?’
Thorne caught the eye of the PO who was clearly wondering whether or not to intervene. He shook his head to let her know there was not a problem.