About five minutes later, not much more, Mehmet and Reyhan were returning to checkout thirty. At checkout twenty-five Mehmet felt a terrible constriction start in his stomach as if a giant invisible hand had begun to squeeze the life out of the core of his being. He picked his daughter up in his arms. She could feel the sudden tension in her father’s body and his grip tighten round her and she put her arms around his neck for comfort. His stride lengthened and then became a run. He stopped short by the self-service checkout.
Checkout thirty was now deserted. There was no sign of his shopping. The manageress was gone. His trolley was gone. His son was gone. He gently put Reyhan down and stared around him in bewildered disbelief. His heart was racing and his mouth very dry. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. Momentarily he thought he was going to faint. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his heart started racing.
He looked around him, at the orderly shelves, the other customers. Surely, he thought, there has been some kind of mistake, some kind of mix-up. They must be round here somewhere. He gently put Reyhan down on the floor.
He thought: Where is he?
He thought: This can’t be happening.
He thought: I don’t believe this.
He stood there, stupidly, his head swivelling left and right. Outside the huge, glass window of the supermarket, cars and people came and went, life continued, while Mehmet stood as if frozen in some kind of aquarium.
Reyhan stared at her father and then bent down and picked something up that had fallen out of Mehmet’s line of sight under the lip of the checkout. She could sense the tension in her father but wasn’t sure why. Perhaps this would help.
‘Look, Papa,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s Grey Rabbit.’
It was then Mehmet felt despair and fear hit him harder than he could ever have imagined. His son would never have been separated from his toy. He knew then with a terrible clarity that Ali was gone.
3
If you looked out of the window of Assistant Commissioner Corrigan’s office you could see the iconic sight of the Thames on one side and the green of St James’s Park stretching away to Buckingham Palace on the other. It was typical of Corrigan, thought Hanlon, that he had managed, while professing no interest at all in the matter, to install himself in a room with one of the most spectacular views that the twenty-storey glass, concrete and granite building that was New Scotland Yard could provide.
People often underestimated Corrigan, usually to their cost. His enormous size (he was six foot five), shovel-like hands and builder’s-slab face made people think he was a street copper promoted way above his ability, maybe to fulfil some kind of quota. He looked that way. He looked anachronistic. People seemed to expect senior police these days to behave and sound like management consultants. Corrigan didn’t. He had the face of the old-fashioned Irish navvy that his grandfather had been. He also shared his grandfather’s strength. The old man had reputedly been able to straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands. Corrigan couldn’t do this, but he looked as if he could give it a bloody good go.
In fact the AC had a highly attuned grasp of politics allied with an almost feminine sensitivity to mood and thought and nuance. It suited him down to the ground to be thought thick. You usually only got one chance to underestimate Corrigan; he was adept at slipping the knife in. He’d ended several rivals’ careers, fellow officers who’d underestimated him, who now sat shuffling paper or reading their emails in disappointing dead-end jobs in Hendon or Basingstoke.
Another of the AC’s survival skills was the ability to smell the way the wind was blowing. It had brought him promotion in the past and he was hoping it would do so again. Currently he was steering a delicate path between multi-ethnic policing and a rising backlash against it from critics citing police unwillingness to tackle difficult issues in case they were branded as racist. It was a difficult juggling act.
Framed citations, decorations and awards were hung over the walls of the office. Most of these had been assiduously and discreetly lobbied for by the assistant commissioner. While on the surface he claimed that such things were meaningless to him, that what counted was getting the job done, he enjoyed the celebrity part of his job. He liked being recognized, enjoyed being feted. He was a great one for backing into the limelight. There were photos too. Corrigan sharing a joke with the home secretary, Corrigan waggling a pair of handcuffs at the prime minister. Corrigan with the mayor. There was a gap in the wall where Corrigan had taken down Ken Livingstone. As soon as the results were in and Ken was yesterday’s man, down he had come. Hanlon noted as she sat down opposite him that the home secretary’s photo too had gone now, to be replaced by a smiling Arab in white robes and a headdress. Corrigan obviously had little faith in her future. That boded ill for the politician. Corrigan had a finely tuned nose for that kind of thing.
The Arab, Hanlon guessed, would turn out to be the interior minister of some oil-rich state where Corrigan would wind up doing very well-paid consultancy work should his bid to become Metropolitan Police commissioner fail. She could see Corrigan in somewhere like Doha, advising the Qataris. Corrigan would have several insurance policies on the go; he was that kind of man.
Right now, Corrigan was in a bad mood and it showed. He had supported Hanlon when no other senior figure would dare. Politics and police work inevitably go together and Hanlon was politically troublesome. The Metropolitan Police is a huge organization, employing some fifty thousand people with a budget of over four billion pounds. In common with all large organizations it does not encourage maverick individuals. It can’t afford to and it doesn’t want to. When a precedent is set, others will follow. If more police followed Hanlon’s lead and disobeyed orders, recklessly endangering themselves and potentially inflaming an already explosive situation, it would be disastrous. But she had saved a fellow officer’s life and she had shown exceptional bravery. And Corrigan liked her a lot. So he had thrown his considerable weight behind Hanlon and was beginning to suspect he might regret it.
‘So this witchcraft killing?’ he began. As soon as he’d heard about it he had sent Hanlon down to check on it. It was the kind of story the press would get excited about.
‘Is probably not a witchcraft killing at all, sir,’ said Hanlon.
‘Really?’ said the AC sceptically. ‘I thought all these feathers and stuff, the crucifix… what about all of that then?’
Hanlon shrugged. She was wearing a V-necked black cashmere sweater and the AC could see the delicate but powerful muscle that ran from her neck to her shoulder, her trapezius, move under the skin like an elegant cable as she did so. Having Hanlon in his office always had the effect of making him feel overweight and out of condition. Last week he’d had a mandatory work medical and had been warned about his BMI. He wondered what Hanlon’s BMI would be. Crazily low, he suspected. Maybe that was why she seemed to live in a state of constant irritation. Maybe that’s why she also looked so tired all the time.
‘Sources say that she had been extensively sexually assaulted and is probably of non-Christian origin, sir.’
‘So it’s assault and murder; it’s straightforward then,’ said Corrigan.
‘So it would seem, sir,’ she agreed. Straightforward was Essex police’s view. The SIO on the case had been unmoved by the ‘eighteen’ on the wall of the bunker. ‘If that’s what it is, so what? Have we got seventeen other missing black girls? No, we haven’t. Have we got seventeen other burnt bodies? I haven’t seen any. Life’s complicated enough without looking for problems,’ he’d said in a dismissive tone. Hanlon wasn’t so sure.
Corrigan looked at Hanlon with his shrewd eyes. ‘So it would seem’ was very much an evasive answer. Hanlon was careful with words. She weighed them carefully before she used them, like a miser with money. She was returning his gaze coldly. He thought to himself, you’re not telling me everything. There was little he could do about it. You couldn’t push Hanlon or intimidate her. He decided to bring this conversation to an end.