‘Please state your name and profession.’
‘Barry Wilder. Builder.’
‘Thank you. Did you ever meet a man called Bert Page, Mr Wilder?’
He looked startled. ‘Who’s Bert Page?’
‘Bert Page was a war hero. Landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. Won the Distinguished Service Medal. Then, a lifetime later, Darren Donovan put him in a coma.’
‘Ah, Bert Page – the old gentleman who got mugged by the junkie they just strung up. No, I never met Mr Page. But he sounds like a fine old man.’
‘Did you have contact with Mahmud Irani after he was released from prison?’
Wilder hesitated.
I felt Edie tense beside me.
‘Yes,’ he said.
We waited. I stared at the faded football tattoos on his arms. I saw now they were two crossed irons. West Ham.
‘I got a knife,’ Barry Wilder said quietly. ‘I was planning to stick it in his heart.’
I heard Edie exhale by my side.
I leaned forward.
‘Mr Wilder, I want you to understand that you are not under arrest but you do have the right to have a legal representative present,’ I said. ‘And I have to remind you this interview is being recorded and may be given in evidence if any case is brought to trial.’
He ignored me.
‘I wanted to kill him,’ he said.
Then he waited.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You wanted to kill him . . .’
‘I thought I could kill him. I thought God would forgive me because of what he did to our Sofi. The way he ruined her. The way he took her life away from her and nobody did anything to stop him. Not you and your lot. And not me, the one man she should have been able to trust. The one man who should have protected her. And I didn’t, did I? Her own father didn’t protect her. Mahmud Irani and those men took her to those rooms and then they filled her with drink and drugs and then they did whatever they wanted to.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever they wanted, they did to her. And then they phoned their friends and their fucking brothers, and they came round to do what they wanted to my daughter. They made their own pornography. That’s what they were doing with her. And when we got her back, she was pregnant. Did you know that? Did you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘She lost the baby and I thanked God. And how can I live with myself, thanking God for the death of a baby?’
‘Tell me about the knife,’ I said.
‘I said I was going to kill him in the courtroom. You knew that. You quoted the exact words! When they all went down for whatever pitiful little stretch they got. When the judge gave them their slap on their wrists. When all those evil bastards were laughing at us. I said I was going to kill him, didn’t I? So then I got the knife and I waited for him at the mosque where he prays every Friday.’
‘What happened?’
‘I couldn’t do it.’ His voice choking now. ‘I didn’t have it in me. I wanted him to die – and I wanted to be the one who did it – but I was not enough of a man to do it.’
‘Did you ever meet Paul Warboys, Mr Wilder?’
‘Paul Warboys – the gangster?’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.
I reached across and turned off the machine quietly, anxious not to intrude on a grief that would never end.
Outside the interview room, Jean Wilder had a cigarette in her mouth. She brandished it at Edie, to show that it wasn’t lit, but when she got to her feet and got in my face, I could still smell the scent of tobacco that she always carried with her, and I could still smell the Jimmy Choo perfume and Juicy Fruit chewing gum that she used to cover it.
‘Will you ever leave us alone?’ she said. ‘You useless flat-footed fools. He didn’t do it. We have been through hell in this family. Mahmud Irani destroyed this family and my husband didn’t do a thing. Why don’t you arrest the stinking Paki bastards that are out there raping our children right now? Right now. Right now. Why don’t you do something useful? Why do you let those Paki bastards get away with murder?’
‘Stop,’ Barry Wilder said, very quietly, and she stopped immediately, shaking her head.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ I said.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Jean Wilder. ‘We can find the door ourselves. Go and catch some villains. Make yourself useful.’
When Edie and I went up to MIR-1, Tara was already running the voice biometrics on Wilder’s interview.
‘He’s telling the truth,’ I said.
A slim figure was standing by the window, looking down on Savile Row. She turned to face us and it took a long moment for me to recognise her.
‘I want to show you something,’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.
19
Pat Whitestone sat at her workstation in MIR-1 and searched online until she found a ninety-second film of pure horror.
‘Look,’ she told us.
The footage was grainy, jerky, filmed by someone who was at the end of a long night. It opened on a club, the dance floor as crowded as a tube train at rush hour, the music a wall of booming noise. Boom, boom, boom. Girls in heels and miniskirts. Shirtless boys holding bottles. Dancing in a space where there was no room to dance. Boom, boom, boom. And then the first screams. High-pitched, disbelieving, the revellers all turning their heads, straining to see.
The crowd parted.
A boy with blood covering his face staggered across the dance floor.
Staggering on legs that were on the verge of giving out. His hands held out before him, groping for help.
Blinded.
The club began to glow with the white lights of phone cameras as more of them began to film the broken boy.
‘Look what they did to my son,’ Whitestone said.
‘Online?’ I said. ‘How the hell can it be online?’
‘Because fifty people got out their phones and filmed him. They filmed him, Max. Nobody helped him. But they all filmed him.’
On the film, the white lights followed fifteen-year-old Justin Whitestone as he sank to his knees in the middle of the empty dance floor and screamed. A terrible sound, filled more with fear than pain, and the pain must have been unbearable. Somebody laughed. The film stopped.
‘Who have we arrested?’ Edie said.
‘Nobody,’ Whitestone said. ‘It happened in the toilets. Somebody put a bottle across his eyes in the toilets. The place was full of people but nobody saw a thing. My Just will need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life – and nobody saw a thing.’
‘There must be CCTV cameras,’ Edie said.
‘Not in toilets,’ Whitestone said. She was still staring at the frozen image on her computer screen. Her son on his knees, blood streaming from his torn eyes, the long-legged high-heeled girls and shirtless gym-fit boys standing behind him with their phones in their hands. ‘No CCTV cameras in toilets, Edie. Invasion of privacy.’
‘Pat?’
‘Yes, Max?’
She was hypnotised by the image on the screen and still would not look at me.
‘They must know who did it,’ I said.
‘Oh, they know all right. It’s a gang from one of the estates behind King’s Cross. The Dog Town Boys. Have you heard of them? I even know their names and where they live. But nobody saw anything, nobody is willing to come forward, and there are no cameras to prove a thing.’
I reached forward and hit the command and Q buttons on her keyboard. Quit. The image disappeared. She looked at me. But there was nothing I could tell her to stop the pain. And if it had been my child in the hospital, my Scout with her sight gone and her attackers still walking the streets, there would have been nothing that she could have done for me.
‘They’re getting away with it, Max,’ Whitestone told me. ‘But then they usually do.’