2
‘OUR VICTIM’S NAME is Aamir Chowdhury,’ said Detective Inspector Dana Tulloch. Minutes earlier, she’d been appointed head of the investigation into the death of the man in Larkhill Park. She and her team weren’t next on the rota, but all early signs suggested that this was a crime motivated by racial hatred, and the Met was covering itself. Tulloch was half Indian, with creamy gold skin and gleaming black hair. Not that black, admittedly, but black enough to count. It would be harder to accuse her of not taking the murder of an Asian man seriously than it might be to point the finger at some of her white colleagues.
The man in the park, Aamir Chowdhury, had been pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, although early reports suggested that he’d been dead before the ambulance crew had taken him from the park. On the basis of my testimony, and given that he’d been heavily doused in petrol, the case was being handled as a murder investigation.
‘Mr Chowdhury was twenty-seven years old, a British Muslim,’ Tulloch went on. ‘His parents were born in Pakistan, moved to Britain in the 1970s. Chowdhury himself was a junior doctor at St Thomas’s. He lived alone in a flat not far from the hospital and phoned his mother at six this evening to say he wouldn’t be coming round to the family home as they’d planned, because he had to go back into work.’
The team gathered together at short notice was a large one, many of whom I knew from the Ripper investigation. Detective Sergeant Neil Anderson, a softening, thinning-haired man in his forties, reliable and dedicated, but never going to make chief constable. Pete Stenning and Tom Barrett, young detective constables: Stenning, super-straight; Barrett, a bit of a joker. Gayle Mizon I’d worked with quite closely on my last case: blonde, early thirties, she was a safe pair of hands. Once the victim had been carried from the park, I’d been whisked away to give my statement. Anderson and Mizon had taken it between them. When it was over, I followed them up to the briefing room. I wasn’t on duty, I wasn’t even officially part of this team, I just knew that going quietly home would be impossible.
‘He was identified by his father at the scene and also by documents in his wallet,’ Tulloch was saying. ‘Early signs are that this was a crime motivated by racial hatred. We’ve been given the names of five men whom the family believes are responsible for the attack. They are all white, in their early twenties, and live in the same part of London as the dead man. According to the family, the victim has been subject to ongoing abuse and intimidation for some time now. I want them bringing in. We’ve already applied for warrants to search their properties.’
‘How do we know the attackers were white?’ I asked.
I’d been sitting at the edge of the group, half hidden behind blokes leaning against desks. Tulloch had to step forward to see me properly.
‘Lacey, you shouldn’t even be here,’ she said. ‘Give me five minutes, I’ll get someone to run you home.’
‘They were wearing masks,’ I said. ‘So who says they were white?’
Tulloch looked at Anderson, who opened his notebook and flicked back a few pages. ‘Shahid Karim was at the far side of the park at 19.33 hours,’ he said. ‘He saw five white men run across the pitches, coming from the direction of the children’s play area. They disappeared on to the Wandsworth Road.’
‘An alien, a wolf, a zombie, a goblin and the Queen,’ I said.
Eyes stared at me. A couple of people exchanged bemused glances.
‘Did he tell you that?’ I asked.
Some eyes remained fixed on me. The rest went back to Tulloch, who raised an eyebrow at Anderson.
‘Mr Karim said nothing about masks,’ he told her. ‘I made a note to double-check when Lacey mentioned it downstairs just now. You’d think it was the sort of thing he would have remembered.’
Tulloch nodded. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Can we get word to the team down at the recreation ground? If they dumped the masks between fleeing the scene and being spotted leaving the playing fields then they’ll still be down there.’
Barrett crossed the room and picked up the phone.
‘Right, Lacey,’ said Tulloch, ‘as you’re here, why don’t you tell us all what you saw? As much as you can remember.’
Conscious of all eyes on me, many of them more than half curious about the detective constable who’d achieved such notoriety only weeks earlier, I went through the events of the evening again, from my first taking the call from Control.
‘I thought I heard someone running away just before I got to the park,’ I said, ‘but I honestly can’t be sure it had anything to do with the attack. Another thing I’m not sure about is whether they were all men, but my guess is they were. Several of them were tall; the ones who weren’t seemed to be built like men. I’d struggle to guess ages, but they all moved pretty quickly when they had to, so not that old. On the other hand, definitely all adults. Probably all over twenty. They didn’t move like kids.’
‘And you think this was deliberate?’ asked Anderson. ‘Not just messing around gone badly wrong.’ He and I had already gone through this, he just wanted the others to hear it from me.
‘They all had sticks,’ I said. ‘They surrounded him. As he got near to any of them, they’d push him back with the sticks. They wanted to keep him burning. And they were taunting him.’
Anderson looked up. ‘You didn’t say that earlier.’
‘Sorry, I just remembered. It happened very fast.’
‘What were they saying?’ asked Tulloch.
I took a moment, thought hard, then shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I admitted, ‘I can’t remember any words, if I even heard them clearly enough.’
Silence for a moment as I dropped my eyes to the ground and they gave me time. I was thinking. I’d definitely heard them taunting him, so why couldn’t I recall what they’d said?
‘What is it, Lacey?’ asked Tulloch.
I looked up. ‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘Just something that doesn’t feel right. Who reported it? Who made the call in the first place?’
Tulloch looked from one face to another.
‘Anonymous,’ said Stenning. ‘A female voice, talking from a mobile. Possibly someone in one of the overlooking houses who didn’t want to get involved.’
‘Maybe the person Lacey heard running away,’ suggested Mizon. ‘Anything else you can tell us about him? Her?’
‘Tallish, slim,’ I said. ‘Able to run pretty fast. Could have been anyone.’
They sent me home shortly after that.
3
I WOKE THE next day to find the country talking of little other than hate crime. Most of the main news sites covered the attack: it was on BBC, ITV and Channel 4 news. The premeditated nature of the murder, the brutality of it and the agonies the man had suffered before death were all grist to the mill of the country’s media, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder, united by collective outrage. Every channel I turned to seemed to carry calls for ‘robust action’ to combat the rising trend of Islamophobic attacks. A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain cited violent assaults, death threats, fire-bombing of mosques and desecration of graves as just a few examples of the rising wave of crime against British Muslims, most of which went unreported or was inadequately investigated.