Allen came back in to see Kitson emerging through the doorway and Holland rifling through his collection of thrash metal and torture porn. He stood in the centre of the living room and raised his arms in outrage.
Said, ‘This is taking the piss.’
Holland nodded towards the stereo system: a Denon CD and Blu-Ray player; the big Bose speakers at either end of the room and the smaller ones mounted high up on the walls. ‘This is decent gear, Pete. I wouldn’t mind something like this myself.’ He turned to look at the plasma TV that took up most of one wall. ‘Have to put in a bit more overtime though.’
‘I’ve got receipts,’ Allen said. ‘All right?’
Holland looked impressed. ‘You must be getting some good tips then.’
‘What?’
‘On the horses.’
‘Yeah, I’ve had a few winners.’
‘And we can check that, can we?’ Kitson asked. ‘Obviously your bookie up the road keeps records of all his payouts.’ She sat down on a faded brown armchair. ‘For tax reasons, you know?’
Allen seemed to grow agitated suddenly. He walked over to the wall and leaned back hard against it. ‘Is there any point to this?’ He pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘Because if you’re waiting for tea and biscuits you can stick them up your arse.’
Holland dropped into the chair that was in front of the TV and turned it round so that he and Kitson were both facing Allen. ‘Why did you put Amin Akhtar in hospital?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t,’ Allen said.
‘Sure?’ Kitson asked. ‘Five minutes ago you didn’t even know who he was.’
‘I just meant… I never knew him very well, that’s all. You know how many kids there are in there?’
‘Why does it matter if you knew him or not?’ Holland asked. ‘How well did you know that woman you battered with the fence post?’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Some of the prison officers think it was.’
‘Well they can kiss my arse, same as you can.’ Allen was doing his very best to look cocky, but there was still nervousness around the eyes as he tried and failed to stare Holland and Kitson out. ‘Look, I never took a knife to that kid, what else can I tell you?’
‘Who said anything about a knife?’
Allen looked flustered, but only for a second or two. Then he smiled, pleased with himself. ‘Everybody knew he’d been slashed, so you’re not being clever. Something like that happens, word gets round before the poor bastard’s finished bleeding. Besides, the screws turned my cell over looking for it, didn’t they? And they found sod all.’
‘It’s a fair point, Pete,’ Kitson said. ‘There isn’t a scrap of evidence and the fact is that even if you told us right here and now that it was you, we’re far too busy to do a great deal about it. I mean the kid’s dead now, right, and it wasn’t like you had anything to do with that.’ She waited, studied his face. ‘But let’s just say hypothetically that it was you who attacked him-’
‘It wasn’t.’
Kitson held her hand up. ‘For the sake of argument, all right? If it was you, then why might you have done it? Like you say, you barely knew the kid, right? It wasn’t like it was revenge for some fight you’d had with him or he’d said something to piss you off in the canteen, was it? Not a kid like him. I mean… fair play to you, you did a very nice job, you got away with it somehow. You managed to stash the knife somewhere, got yourself cleaned up, but it was still a hell of a risk.’ She turned to Holland. ‘Don’t you reckon?’
Holland nodded. ‘You’d have to be an idiot.’
‘What were you, just a few days from being released? Something like that would have put plenty more time on your sentence, so there’s no way you’d have done it without a seriously good reason, is there? Without something decent in it for you, I mean. You’re not Brain of Britain, but you’re not an idiot, are you, Pete?’
Allen struggled for something to say. Settled for: ‘This is bollocks.’
‘Maybe you did it because someone asked you to.’
‘What?’ Allen shook his head and tried to laugh, but it was tight, strangled.
‘Where did the money come from for all this?’ Holland asked. The dog was whimpering outside the kitchen, scratching at the back door. ‘And don’t tell us it was the three-thirty at Kempton Park, because we’re certainly not idiots.’
Allen sniffed and looked as though he was considering spitting on the floor, until he remembered he was in his own living room. He pushed himself away from the wall and said, ‘I’ve got to feed my dog.’
Holland and Kitson watched as Allen sauntered into the kitchen and closed the door behind him. They heard him open the back door, then listened to the skitter of the puppy’s claws on the tiles and Allen fussing over it, his voice deliberately raised so that they could hear just how unconcerned he was.
‘If you tell us who put you up to it, we can guarantee you won’t be prosecuted for the attack,’ Kitson shouted.
Holland looked at her. They had been authorised to give no such guarantee. Kitson shrugged.
There was no response from the kitchen.
After half a minute they stood up to leave, but as Kitson moved back towards the porch, Holland walked across and leaned in close to the kitchen door. ‘Good luck.’
There was a pause before Allen answered. ‘What?’
‘I was talking to the dog,’ Holland said.
THIRTY
Good people who snapped, they were always tricky to deal with. It was what they did that counted of course, the havoc no different to that wrought by multiple killers with no discernible conscience, the grief of those left behind no less crippling. But still…
Hard to treat them the same way.
As Thorne drove north, he thought about a Russian he had read about in a magazine, a man who had tracked down the Swiss air traffic controller whose negligence had cost the lives of his wife and children in a plane crash. The Russian had gone to the man’s door holding a photograph of his dead family and when the air traffic controller had knocked the picture from his hands, the man had lost his reason, burst into the house and stabbed the owner to death.
‘It was as if he had taken them from me all over again,’ the Russian had said, and years later, when he was finally released from prison, there had been a parade held in his honour.
Good people who snapped.
He remembered a teacher – the ‘best in the school’, according to parents and other members of staff – who had put a fifteen-year-old boy into a coma with a cricket stump after being baited once too often. Thorne had watched the man break down in the interview room, weeping like a child for two lives wiped out in a few seconds of madness. ‘The red mist,’ the teacher had said to him. ‘One of my kids put that in an English essay once and I crossed it out and put “cliche”, but that’s exactly what it’s like. I was watching this arm clutching that stump and then I realised it was mine, but I just couldn’t stop swinging it. It was like there was blood in my eyes.’
Thorne could not foresee a parade when the teacher completed his sentence for attempted murder, but neither had there been any team celebration in the pub the day he was sent down. He guessed that it would be much the same when things had played themselves out in Tulse Hill, unless Javed Akhtar did something very stupid.
Negotiating his way across the main roundabout at Elephant and Castle, Thorne knew that he was somewhere close to where Holland lived. One of the turnings off St George’s Road. He’d only been there a couple of times, on the last occasion just after Chloe was born, but Sophie had not been shy about making her feelings towards him obvious, and there had certainly not been an invitation to return.