The Demands
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Synopsis
The Crime The customers in a London convenience store are taken captive. Among them is young mother, Detective Helen Weeks. She is told her life depends on the co-operation of one of her colleagues - detective Tom Thorne.
The Demand Akhtar is desperate to know what really happened to his beloved son, who died a year before in prison. He is convinced the death was not an accident and forces the one man who knows more about the case than any other, Thorne, to re-investigate.
The Twist What Thorne discovers will upend everything he thought he knew about the fate of those he's put away...but will it be enough to fulfill the wishes of a grieving and potentially violent father?
Release date: June 12, 2012
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Print pages: 416
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The Demands
Mark Billingham
CHEWING GUM AND chocolate, maybe a bottle of water on those hen’s teeth days when the sun was shining. A paper for the journey into work and half a minute of meaningless chat while she was waiting for her change.
Nothing there worth dying for.
Helen Weeks would tell herself much the same thing many times before it was over. In the hours spent staring at the small black hole from which death could emerge in less time than it took for her heart to beat. Or stop beating. In those slow-motion moments of terror that measured out each day and in the sleepless nights that followed. While the man who might kill her at any moment was shouting at himself just a few feet away, or crying in the next room.
It is not my time to die.
Or my baby’s time to lose his mother…
The chewing gum was a habitual thing, something to do and to help her stay off the cigarettes she’d given up two years before when she’d become pregnant. A newspaper ensured she would not have to look at the people sitting opposite her on the train, presuming she was lucky enough to get a seat and did not find herself pressed up against some lard-arse in a cheap suit who bought his aftershave from Poundstretcher. The chocolate was an addiction, pure and simple. One that had made the struggle to lose weight since her son was born no more than partially successful. She would try and eke it out; a chunk or two around eleven with a coffee, another after lunch and the rest as a treat at the end of the day. That was always the plan, but it was usually gone before she’d so much as logged on at her desk or, if the case she was working on was particularly unpleasant, by the time her train had finished its four-minute journey to Streatham station.
There were a lot of unpleasant cases.
She collected her paper from the rack near the door of the newsagent’s, and by the time she reached the counter Mr. Akhtar had already picked out her usual chewing gum and chocolate bar of choice. He smiled and brandished them as she approached.
Same as always. Their private joke.
“How is the little one?” he asked.
Mr. Akhtar was a short, prematurely balding man who almost always had a smile on his face. He rarely wore anything other than dark trousers, a white shirt and a cardigan, though that might be blue or brown. Helen thought he was probably younger than he looked, but put him somewhere in his mid-fifties.
“He’s good,” Helen said. She was aware of the customer she had seen browsing through the magazines on her way in, moving up to stand behind her. The man—tall, black, thirties—had been looking up at some of the covers in the top shelf’s “gentleman’s interest” section and had quickly dropped his eyes down to the lifestyle and motoring mags when he’d seen Helen come in. “Yeah, he’s good.”
Mr. Akhtar smiled and nodded and handed over the chewing gum and chocolate. “Hard work though, yes?”
Helen rolled her eyes and said, “Sometimes.”
Actually, Alfie was way better than good. He was indescribably brilliant. She grinned, thinking about her one-year-old son babbling happily as she had walked him to the childminder half an hour before. He was happy almost all of the time, as far as she could tell, but he certainly let her know when he wasn’t. He had Paul’s temper, Helen had decided, as well as his eyes.
Or was she kidding herself?
“Worth it though, yes?”
“Definitely,” she said.
“Trust me, it gets harder.”
“Oh, don’t tell me that.” Laughing, Helen handed over two pound coins and waited for the forty-three pence she was given back every morning. As Mr. Akhtar was digging her change from the till, she heard the bell on the door. She saw him glance up and heard the voices, braying and fearless, as a group of lads came into the shop.
She looked round. Three of them: one black, two white. All full of themselves.
“Here you are,” Mr. Akhtar said. He held out Helen’s change, but his eyes were on the three boys, and his voice was a little smaller than it had been a few seconds earlier. Before Helen turned back to him, she watched the boys amble across to the tall fridge and open the door, laughing and cursing.
Enjoying the attention of an audience, Helen thought.
“Looks like it might be nice today.”
“That’s good,” Mr. Akhtar said. Still quiet, looking towards the fridge.
“Won’t last.” Helen put the coins into her purse and folded the newspaper into her bag. She heard the man behind her exhale loudly, clearly impatient to be served. She had just opened her mouth to say “see you tomorrow” when Mr. Akhtar leaned towards her and whispered, nodding towards the three boys.
“I hate those bastards,” he hissed.
Helen looked round again. They were rooting around inside the fridge, pulling out cans, then putting them back again. Laughing and pushing each other. One, who must have grabbed a paper on the way in, was leaning against a display of greeting cards, rifling through the pages.
The man standing behind Helen muttered, “Christ’s sake.” She could not be sure if it was frustration at being made to wait or irritation at the behavior of the boys at the fridge.
“Hey,” Mr. Akhtar said.
Helen turned back to the till, then heard the hiss of a can being opened and saw Mr. Akhtar’s expression darken suddenly.
“Hey!”
Another hiss, and now two boys were swigging from cans of Coke, while the third tossed the remains of his newspaper away and reached into the fridge for one of his own.
“You pay for those,” Mr. Akhtar shouted.
“I forgot my wallet,” one of the boys said. The other two laughed, touched their fists together.
The white boy who had been reading the newspaper drained his can and crushed it. “What are you going to do if we don’t?” He held his arms out wide in challenge. “Blow yourself up or something?”
“You need to pay.”
Helen looked at Mr. Akhtar. She could see the muscles working in his jaw, his arms stiff at his sides, his fists clenched. She took a small step to her right, moved into his eyeline, and shook her head.
Leave it.
“Get out of my shop,” Mr. Akhtar shouted.
The white boy’s eyes looked small and dead as he dropped his empty can and walked slowly towards the till. One hand slid fast into the pocket of his hooded top. “Make us,” he said. Behind him, his friends dropped their own cans, sending Coke fizzing across the floor of the shop.
“Sorry,” one of them said.
Suddenly, Helen had no spit in her mouth. She eased her hand into her bag and closed her fingers around the wallet that held both her Oyster and warrant cards. It was bravado, no more than that, she was almost certain. One flash of her ID and a few strong words and the gobby little sods would be out of there in a shot.
“I think Osama’s shit himself.”
But an instant after Helen’s professional instinct kicked in, another took hold that was far stronger. It could so easily be a knife in the kid’s pocket, after all. She knew that she could take nothing for granted and was aware of what could happen to have-a-go heroes. She knew one community police support officer in Forest Hill who had reprimanded a fourteen-year-old for dropping litter a few months before. He was still on a ventilator.
She had had more than her fair share of this a year or so before.
Now, she had a child…
“Your shop, but it ain’t your country.”
The man who had been waiting to be served moved closer to her. Was he trying to protect her, or protect himself? Either way, he was breathing heavily and when she turned she could see that he was eyeing up the door, wondering if he should make a dash for it.
Trying to decide whether or not to make a move.
Same as she was.
“You lot are pussies without a bomb in your backpack.” The white boy took another step towards the counter. He was grinning and opened his mouth to say something else, then stopped when he saw Mr. Akhtar reach quickly below the counter and come up with a baseball bat.
One of the boys at the fridge whistled, mock-impressed, and said, “Oh, look out.”
The newsagent moved surprisingly quickly.
Helen took a step towards the end of the counter, but felt herself held back by the man next to her and could only watch as Mr. Akhtar came charging from behind it, yelling and swinging the bat wildly.
“Get the hell out. Get out.”
The white boy backed quickly away, his hand still in his pocket, while the other two turned on their heels and ran for the door, their arms reaching out to send tins and packets of cereal scattering as they went. They screamed threats and promised that they would be back and one of them shouted something about the place stinking of curry anyway.
When the last one was out on the pavement—still swearing threats and making obscene gestures—Mr. Akhtar slammed the door. He fumbled in his pocket for keys and locked it, then stood with his head against the glass, breathing heavily.
Helen took a step towards him, asked if he was all right.
Outside, one of the boys kicked at the window, then hawked up a gobbet of thick spittle onto the glass. It had just begun to dribble down past the ads for gardeners, guitar teachers and massage, when he was pulled away by his friends.
“I’m going to make a call,” Helen said. “We’ve got it all on camera, so there’s nothing to worry about.” She glanced up at the small camera above the till and realized it was almost certainly a dummy. “I can give good descriptions of all three of them, OK? You know I’m a police officer, so…”
Still with his back to the shop, Mr. Akhtar nodded and began fumbling in his pocket a second time.
“Mr. Akhtar?”
When he turned round, the newsagent was pointing a gun.
“Oh, Jesus,” the man next to Helen said.
Helen swallowed hard, tried to control the shaking in her leg and in her voice when she spoke. “What are you doing—?”
Mr. Akhtar shouted then and swore as he told Helen and her fellow customer exactly what would happen if they did not do what he said. The curse sounded awkward in his mouth, though, like something spoken by an actor who has over-rehearsed.
Like a white lie.
“Shut up,” he screamed. “Shut up or I will fucking kill you.”
Two
“IT’S ESPRESSO, FOR crying out loud,” Tom Thorne shouted. “Espresso…”
The man—who of course could not hear him—was talking enthusiastically about how he could not even think about starting his day without that all-important hit of caffeine. He said the offending word again and Thorne slapped his hand against the steering wheel.
“Not expresso, you pillock. There’s no bloody X in it…”
Sitting in a long line of rush-hour traffic, crawling north towards lights on Haverstock Hill, Thorne glanced right and saw a woman staring across at him from behind the wheel of a sporty-looking Mercedes. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. Muttered, “Sod you, then,” when she turned away. He had hoped that, having seen him talking to himself, she might presume that he was making a hands-free call, but she clearly had him marked down as a ranting nutter.
“I suppose that a nice strong expresso gives you an expecially good start to the day, does it?”
Looking for something else, anything else, to listen to, he stabbed at the preset buttons; settled eventually for something sweet and folksy, a soft, pure voice and a song he half recognized.
Shouting at the radio was probably just another sign of growing older, Thorne thought. One of the many. Up there on the list with losing a little hearing in his right ear and thinking that there was nothing worth watching on television anymore. Wondering why teenagers thought it was cool to wear their trousers around their knees.
The song finished and the DJ cheerfully informed him which station he was tuned in to.
Up there with listening to Radio 2!
Changes of opinion or temperament were inevitable of course, Thorne knew that, and on some days he might even admit that they were not necessarily a bad thing. When change happened gradually, its slow accretion of shifts and triggers could go almost unnoticed, but Thorne was rarely comfortable with anything that was more sudden. However necessary it might be. Too many things in his life had changed recently, or were in the process of changing, and he was still finding it hard to cope with any of them.
To adjust.
He pulled somewhat less than smoothly away from the lights, cursing as his foot slipped off the still unfamiliar accelerator pedal.
The bloody car, for a start.
He had finally traded in his beloved 1975 BMW CSi for a two-year-old 5 Series that was rather more reliable and for which he could at least obtain replacement parts when he needed them. The car had been the first and as yet only thing to go, but more major changes were imminent. His flat in Kentish Town had been on the market for a month, though he still had some repairs to do and buyers seemed thin on the ground. And, despite several weeks of quiet words and clandestine sniffing around, a suitable transfer to another squad had yet to become available.
Then there had been Louise…
All these less than comfortable shifts in Thorne’s life, important as they might seem, were secondary to that. The car, the flat, the job. The flurry of changes had come about, had been decided upon, as a direct result of what had happened with Louise.
He and Louise Porter had finally parted company a couple of months before, after a relationship that had lasted just over two years. For half that time it had been better than either of them had expected; way better than most relationships between police officers, certainly. But as a team they had not been strong enough to cope with the loss of a baby. Neither had been able to give the other the particular form of comfort they needed and, while the relationship had limped on for a while, they had suffered separately and paid heavily for it. Louise had been understandably resentful that Thorne seemed more easily able to deal with the grief of strangers, while Thorne himself had struggled with guilt at not having been quite as devastated by the miscarriage as he thought he should have been. By the time that guilt had burned itself out and Thorne was able to admit just how much he had wanted to be a father, it was too late for both of them.
They had become lovers by numbers, and in the end it had simply fizzled away. It was Louise who finally plucked up the courage to say what needed saying, but Thorne had known for a while that the break had to come, before such feelings as were left between them darkened and became destructive.
They had both kept their own flats, which made the practicalities straightforward enough. Louise had taken away a bin liner stuffed with clothes and cosmetics from Thorne’s place in Kentish Town, while Thorne had left Louise’s flat for the last time with a carrier bag, a few tins of beer and a box of CDs. It had ended with a hug, but it might just as well have been a handshake. Loading his boxes and bags into the back of his car, Thorne had decided that it might be a good idea to change a whole lot of other things.
To start again…
He turned towards Finchley and almost immediately hit a traffic jam. No more than five miles now, but still half an hour or so away from Hendon, and Becke House. The headquarters of the Area West Murder Squad.
“Why the hell do you need to change your job?”
He had been out drinking with Phil Hendricks a few weeks before, and, as always, the Mancunian had not fought shy of giving his opinion. Thorne shook his head, but had listened anyway. Hendricks’ opinion was the one he most valued professionally and the same thing usually applied when it came to his private life, because the pathologist was the nearest thing he had to a best friend.
“Only friend,” Hendricks never tired of saying.
“Why not?” Thorne had asked.
“Because it’s not…relevant. It’s not necessary. It would be like me doing a postmortem on some poor bugger who’d been shot twelve times in the head, then saying the fact he had hardened arteries and a slight heart condition might have had something to do with his death.”
“You’re drunk,” Thorne had said.
“It’s too much, that’s all. Just because you’ve split up with someone doesn’t mean you have to change everything. I mean, car…yes! The bloody thing was a death trap and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with moving to a new flat either. We’ll find you somewhere much nicer than that dump you’re in now and I’ll take you shopping for some decent furniture, but do you really need to be looking for a new job as well?”
“It’s all part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“New start,” Thorne said. “New broom…leaf, whatever.”
“You’re drunker than I am…”
They had moved on to football then and Thorne’s desolate sex life, but Thorne could see that Hendricks had a point, and he had thought about little else since. Even though he still believed he was doing the right thing in looking for a new challenge, the thought of leaving Area West Homicide made him feel slightly sick. The nature of the job and the politics of arse-covering meant that it was often hard to build up real trust between members of a team. Thorne had come to value the relationships he had with a number of those he worked with every day. Men and women he liked and respected. Plenty of idiots as well of course, but even so.
Better the devil you know, all that.
On the radio, Chris Evans was making him almost as angry as Expresso Man, so Thorne turned it off. He switched to CD and scanned through the ten discs he had mounted in the changer. He turned up the volume at the familiar guitar lick and that first lovely rumble of the man’s voice.
Johnny Cash: “Ain’t No Grave.”
“While you’re busy changing things,” Hendricks had said, “you could always do something about that stupid cowboy music.”
Thorne grinned, remembering the pained look on his friend’s face, and pushed on through the traffic towards the office.
It was not as if he was going to take the first thing that came along. Chances were nothing suitable would present itself for a good while anyway, and by the time it did he might feel differently.
For now he would just do his job, wait and see what turned up.
Three
AS HELEN BACKED away from the gun, she could see a face at the window over Akhtar’s shoulder. One of the boys he had chased from the shop, openmouthed at seeing what was happening inside. He shouted something to one of his friends before tearing away, down towards the station. If Akhtar heard it, he did not seem unduly concerned. He just kept walking towards Helen and the man standing next to her.
Good, Helen thought, that’s good. At least now someone on the outside will know what the situation is and will alert the police. This was provided they believed it, of course. She could barely believe what was happening herself.
Mr. Akhtar.
She could not say honestly that she knew the man, not really, but she had been coming into his shop for over a year. They’d spoken every day, no more than pleasantries, but still…
What the hell was he up to?
Pointing with the gun, Akhtar ushered Helen and the other customer around the counter and through a low archway into a cluttered storeroom behind the shop. Sitting on a battered wooden desk was a television showing Daybreak with the sound turned down. There was a single chair, a filing cabinet and a small fridge in the corner with a kettle, some mugs and a jar of coffee on top. Aside from a small sink, almost every inch of space on three of the walls was taken up with cardboard boxes and stacked plastic pallets containing replacement stock.
Tinned goods, crisps, kitchen towels, cigarettes.
There were two doors. The one with bolts top and bottom and a heavy padlock was clearly an exterior door which Helen presumed opened out onto the alleyway that ran along the back of the shops. She guessed that the unpainted plywood door led to a toilet.
Akhtar said he was sorry that things were a little cramped and told them to stand against the one bare wall. He asked Helen if she had a mobile phone. She told him it was in her handbag. He told her to slide the bag across the floor towards him and told the man to slowly do the same with his mobile phone. Then, once he had taken a seat at the desk, he ordered them both to sink down onto their backsides. Without taking his eyes from them, he rooted around in one of the desk drawers before tossing two pairs of metal handcuffs across to Helen.
“Off the Internet,” he said. “Top of the range. Same as the ones you use, I think.”
Helen reached across and picked the cuffs up from the floor. “It’s not too late to stop this,” she said. “Whatever it is you’re doing, things are not too serious yet, OK? I mean I can’t say for sure you’ll stay out of prison, because of the gun, but if you let us go now I’ll do everything I can to make sure that it’s not too bad. Are you listening, Mr. Akhtar?”
He smiled at Helen, a little oddly. Said, “I would like you to handcuff one another to the radiator pipes. There is one at either end, see?”
Helen exchanged a look with the man slumped next to her, and nodded. She reached across and cuffed his right hand to the small pipe that ran down into the floor. When she had finished, though it had now become somewhat awkward and took rather longer, he did the same to her left hand.
“Don’t worry,” the newsagent said. “The radiator is not on, so you will not get too hot.” He looked at Helen. “Nice weather, like you said.”
Helen could see that he was trying to make a joke, but she could also see the tension in his face and hear the tremor in his voice. She could see how frightened he was.
This was not necessarily a good thing.
Satisfied that his prisoners were secure, Akhtar stood up and walked back out into the shop. The man handcuffed next to Helen stared at the archway for a few seconds, then, apparently satisfied that the newsagent was not coming straight back, he turned to her.
“You’re a copper, then?” Perhaps it was because he was trying to talk quietly, but his voice was soft and high. He was well spoken with just a trace of a London accent.
Helen looked at him and nodded.
He had short hair and was wearing a blue suit and patterned tie. He reached up with his free hand and yanked the tie loose, tore at the top button of his shirt. He was sweating.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“What are you going to do about this? ”
Helen looked at him. “Well, there’s not really a lot I can do. Not right this minute.”
The man’s head dropped. “Shit.”
“The first thing is that we need to stay calm, OK?”
“You don’t understand, I’ve got a meeting this morning,” he said. “A really important meeting.”
Helen almost laughed, but the impulse vanished when she saw the desperation on the man’s face. She knew that such a reaction was not uncommon. She had heard about some of the victims of the 7 July bombings, stumbling up onto the street covered in blood, keen to tell police and paramedics that they would skip the visit to the hospital, thank you very much, that they needed to get to this or that appointment. This “inverted” panic was a natural instinct in some; a refusal to accept that a situation could really be as serious as it was.
It’s only a little bit of blood. It’s just a gun…
“I think your meeting’s going to have to wait,” Helen said.
They stared at one another for a few seconds, until she saw the wash of acceptance slide across his face. He nodded slowly and sat back against the radiator. Said, “I’m Stephen, by the way.”
“Helen,” she said.
They both turned at the sudden noise from the front of the shop. A loud grind and clatter. Stephen looked at Helen and she raised her voice over the drone. “He’s closing the shutters on the shop.” They listened in silence until the squeals and clanking had finished, which told them that the solid metal shutters were now down, completely covering the shopfront.
“We’re locked in,” Stephen said.
Helen was watching the doorway. “I think it’s more a question of locking everyone else out.”
They had been locked in anyway, of course, but something in the lowering of the shop’s shutters, a change in the light perhaps, provoked an increased panic in the man. He began yanking at the cuffs which rattled and scraped against the radiator pipe, grunting with the effort that Helen knew was pointless.
“Don’t,” she said.
Stephen just yanked even harder. He moved onto his knees and began swearing and shouting as he used his free hand to try and pull the radiator away from the wall.
“Please don’t—”
When Akhtar walked back into the room, he could see that Stephen had changed his position but he did not seem concerned. He clearly had faith in the quality of the handcuffs and the strength of his radiator pipes. He spent a few minutes wrestling the heavy metal filing cabinet from against a wall and inching it, corner by corner, across the room until it was pushed up against the back door.
He was sweating profusely by the time he had finished. He sat down at the desk and wiped his face with a handkerchief, then fished the gun from his pocket and laid it down on the desktop.
He turned to look at Helen. “You have been in my shop hundreds of times,” he said, “but I still don’t know your name.”
Despite the situation and the fact that her mind was racing as she struggled to make sense of it, Helen felt a peculiar pang of guilt. She told herself she was being ridiculous. Life in a city like London was full of relationships such as theirs. A few words exchanged every day and a necessary distance maintained. Did this man want more than that? Did he feel…slighted? Rejected even? Was he interested in her romantically?
“Helen,” she said. “Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks.”
He nodded. “My name is Javed.” He looked over at the man sitting at the other end of the radiator. “I’m very sorry that you have been caught up in all this, Mr.…?”
Stephen was still breathing heavily. He did not look up. “Stephen Mitchell.”
“I can only apologize, Mr. Mitchell.”
“Listen, Javed—”
Akhtar cut Helen off. “What kind of police officer are you, Miss Weeks?”
Helen was thrown by the question. “I’m sorry?”
“In which area do you work? Do you investigate robberies, fraud? Murder?”
“I work on a Child Protection Unit,” Helen said.
“So not murder?”
“Sometimes…”
“I need to speak to a police officer urgently.”
“So speak to me.” She was careful to keep her tone even and reasonable. “Tell me what it is you want and we can sort all this out. Whatever your problem is, the sooner you let us go, the easier things will be.”
“You don’t understand. I need to speak to a particular police officer, so I need you to help me.”
“I want to help you, but I can’t—” The words caught in Helen’s throat when she saw Akhtar’s expression change and watched him scrabble for the gun. She could see that, for the moment at least, he was done with being apologetic or reasonable.
“I need you to use your phone,” he shouted. “I need you to call whoever you have to call to get this policeman here.”
He was waving the gun at them as he ranted and Helen was aware that, next to her, Mitchell was flinching each time Akhtar used the weapon to emphasize his wishes.
“You get him here now, OK?” Akhtar threw Helen’s handbag back at her and she had to raise her free hand to stop it hitting her in the face. “Get him here and I will tell you what to say when he comes.”
Outside a siren began to sound, and grew louder.
For a few seconds, Akhtar and Mitchell were both staring intently at her. Helen could feel the rage and the fear radiating from both of them and from inside herself. The heater at her back was not turned on, but might just as well have been.
“Who?” she asked.
Akhtar told her the name.
“I know him,” she said. “Not well, but…”
“Good,” Akhtar said. “That might help both of us.”
Helen’s hand was shaking as she reached into her handbag for her phone.
Four
THORNE HAD JUST picked up his own “hit of caffeine” from the ancient and grubby machine in the Incident Room and was walking towards his office, when Detective Chief Inspector Russell Brigstocke stepped out into the corridor in front of him.
“Don’t take your coat off,” Brigstocke said.
“Bloody hell, can I finish my coffee?” Thorne saw the look on his senior officer’s face and stopped smiling. “What?”
“We’ve got a situation in south London.”
“South?” Thorne’s squad worked the north and west of the city and rarely, if ever, ventured south of the river. Even when he wasn’t working, Thorne tried to avoid crossing the water whenever possible.
“A Child Protection Unit in Streatham got a call from one of their officers who claims she’s being held at gunpoint in a newsagent’s in Tulse Hill.” Brigstocke glanced down at the scrap of paper in his hand. “Sergeant Helen Weeks.”
“I know the name,” Thorne said. He tried to remember.
“The CPU found us on the intranet system and the call got put through to me. So—”
“She was the woman whose boyfriend got run down at the bus stop. A year and a bit ago.” Thorne tried to picture the woman who had sat in his office, to whom he had briefly spoken at her partner’s funeral. “He was Job too, remember?”
“No, but it m
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