‘I am very grateful,’ he said now.
Helen nodded, but the smile was much harder to plaster on and keep in place than before. An innocent man was lying dead among yesterday’s newspapers because Javed Akhtar believed the world was conspiring against him. Because he had gone out and bought a gun. Helen would still say and do whatever it took to stay safe, of course. She would do her best to sympathise and forge a bond with this man who held her prisoner, to convince him that she could help, that she was on his side. She would take his side if need be.
But she would never forgive him for Stephen Mitchell.
‘Why did you lie to them?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t really think about it,’ Helen said.
It was almost the truth. Instinct had certainly kicked in quickly, but she had known very well what might happen if the officers running the operation outside thought that a hostage had been killed or injured. She knew that there would suddenly be huge pressure to intervene, to use such force as was necessary to resolve the situation quickly, before the second hostage was also killed.
Before they lost one of their own.
She knew what could happen once that kind of intervention was authorised. Once the bullets started flying. She had done the only thing she could think of to prevent that happening, and though she had been well aware that the lie she was telling could end up costing her career, she had also known that it might just save her life.
It is not my time to die.
Or my baby’s time to lose his mother.
‘It was the sensible thing to do,’ she said.
Akhtar drank his tea and began to talk about how, by this time on an ordinary day, he would normally have been up for four hours already. He told her that he would have driven to work, then delivered the papers and laid out any new stock that was needed before opening the shop. He talked quickly, trying a little too hard to keep things light, while Helen tucked into the biscuits. She realised suddenly that she was ravenous.
Alfie would be up and about by now, she thought, full of beans and demanding to be fed. Would Jenny have been shopping? Would she have the things in that he liked best?
‘So, what do you think will be happening?’ Akhtar asked, suddenly.
Helen looked up. She had not really been listening. ‘Sorry?’
‘Out there.’
He sounded genuinely anxious now, and looking at the tightness around his mouth Helen felt a peculiar rush of elation. Thinking that he damned well deserved to be. She was a trained police officer, for God’s sake, and there were dozens more outside his poxy shop who would happily tear his head off given half a chance…
The feeling was short-lived. She needed him calm and reassured, and her bring-it-on confidence evaporated when she saw the speckles of blood on her tights and thought about Stephen Mitchell’s wife, waiting and hoping somewhere outside.
Denise, who liked a glass of wine and didn’t mind telling people what she thought. Who wanted to wait just a little while longer before she and Stephen had their kids.
‘I don’t know what’s happening out there,’ Helen said. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘I’m sure they’ll be calling soon.’
Akhtar smiled and reached for the remote. ‘We can find out, maybe.’ He turned the sound up on the television, then stood to angle the set so that Helen could see the screen. ‘Good idea?’
They watched for a few minutes until, on the half-hour, Breakfast Time handed over to BBC London for what the smarmy presenter called the ‘news where you are’. The local anchor looked serious as a stock shot of an armed police officer appeared behind her.
‘There are no new developments this morning in the armed siege at a newsagent’s in south London. Overnight, there had been unconfirmed reports of a gunshot from inside the premises, but police have so far refused to comment. They have assured reporters in the last few minutes that both hostages, including an unnamed police officer, are alive and well, and that everything possible is being done to resolve the situation quickly and peacefully.’
Another picture. A different expression. An interview with a local gymnast.
‘So,’ Helen said.
Akhtar grunted and went back to his tea, as though the story they had just heard about had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He nodded towards the television. ‘Shall I leave it on?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘We might as well.’
It was almost surreal, Helen thought. As though he were trying to restore some level of normality to the situation. However incongruous that notion might be with one of them handcuffed to a radiator, one armed with a gun and another growing cold in the next room.
‘I can never usually watch at this time,’ he said. ‘The shop is always so busy, you know?’
So Helen brushed the crumbs from her bloodied skirt and they sat, like any other two people enjoying their breakfast, and watched the rest of the morning’s news.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Thorne was back at the RVP by nine-thirty. In the playground, the small catering van known to all and sundry as ‘Teapot One’ was still serving hot bacon rolls and Thorne could not resist. He saw Sue Pascoe smoking at the side of the main school building and wandered over.
‘You’ll get a detention for that,’ he said.
She took another drag, nodding towards what was left of the roll in Thorne’s hand. ‘And you’ll get hardened arteries.’ She touched a little finger to the side of her mouth. ‘You’ve got… ’
Thorne wiped away the ketchup. ‘So what happened last night? This gunshot.’
Pascoe shook her head. ‘The gun went off, that’s all she said. Maybe he dropped it or something.’
‘Or fired it to prove it was loaded?’
‘Helen said it was an accident and I’m convinced she was saying that of her own free will.’ She turned and crushed the cigarette butt against the wall behind her. ‘Whatever happened, it was enough to give Chivers a stiffy.’
‘I don’t think it takes much,’ Thorne said.
The look on Pascoe’s face told him she was every bit as wary of the CO19 team leader as he was. Another one of many who thought that a significant number of firearms officers took themselves a little too seriously and were rather too enamoured of the alpha-male canteen culture. There had been a minor scandal the year before, when one of their number was accused of slipping song titles into the evidence he was giving at an inquest. This had generated plenty of comic mileage throughout the Met, but sadly, many of those tough-as-old-boots alpha males in CO19 had shown themselves unable to take a joke.
‘So, all quiet overnight then?’
Pascoe explained that an agreement had been reached late the night before between the outgoing team and those replacing them to make no further calls to Helen Weeks until the morning. Nobody believed that anyone inside would be getting a lot of sleep, but it had been decided that it would be best for everyone concerned to let hostages, and hostage taker get as much rest as possible. While the replacement negotiator and firearms officers had remained on high alert throughout the night, there had been no proactive moves made from an operational standpoint, and no calls had been received from inside the newsagent’s.
‘Always good to come through the first night,’ Pascoe said. ‘Thing is though, as time goes on and everyone inside there gets more and more exhausted, they also get less predictable. And that’s more ammunition for those that want to get this resolved sooner rather than later.’
As if on cue, Chivers appeared. He gave Thorne a nod, then focused on Pascoe. ‘Donnelly’s looking for you,’ he said. ‘Time to put another call in.’
Pascoe hurried back towards the entrance and Thorne and Chivers followed a few steps behind.
‘So how’s it going your end?’ Chivers asked. He lowered his voice as though he did not want Pascoe to overhear.