Osama (20 page)

He remembered trying to stand up, but not yet being back in full control of his body.

He remembered Elaine shouting at Conor to come with her, and how his son, as he passed him on the landing, threw himself at Joe, beating him with his tiny fists, a puny flurry of rage that Joe wouldn’t have resisted even if he’d been able to.

He remembered the minutes passing like hours as the strength seeped back into his body.

He knew he was alone in the house with Caitlin’s corpse, that Conor and Elaine had fled. He knew it would be just minutes before the police arrived. They wouldn’t see what they were supposed to have seen – a sight that told a story of Joe having murdered his wife before hanging himself. But they would see enough. And when he heard the sirens – faint at first, but quickly growing louder as the cars approached – he knew what he had to do: forget all thoughts of running to Caitlin’s side, or trying to see his son, or attempting to explain the truth of what had happened.

Forget about everything, except getting out of there. The police would have his name. They’d know who he was. They wouldn’t be sending some two-bit bobby and a community service officer. They’d be sending an ARU, fully prepared to drop him if necessary.

Somehow he found himself standing up, holding on to the banister like he was learning to walk again. He remembered edging towards the top of the stairs, the sirens blaring now, their blue strobes flooding in through the bathroom window, lighting up the hallway. The sound of the door being kicked in. The red dots of laser scopes flashing up the staircase. He could hear his own voice, a shadow of itself, shouting as loud as it could: ‘Unarmed! I have no weapon!’

And he remembered his legs giving way, and the brutal, soul-shaking thump as his body collapsed down the stairs and everything around him went black.

When he reawoke – it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes later – he was surrounded by SOCOs, trying to force him, feet first, into a paper body bag to preserve any incriminating DNA on his clothes and skin. Every muscle in his body shrieked with pain, but that hadn’t stopped him lashing out with heavy fists. It had taken at least six officers to pin him down, bind his hands behind his back and continue the process of wrapping him in the DNA suit, before forcing him outside where the night was lit up by flashing blue lights. He remembered shouting –
screaming
– ?his innocence, yelling about assassins and bin Laden; roaring at them to let him see Caitlin, to let him see his son . . .

But nobody even answered him.

Then he was in a local police station, held down by the same six officers in a small cell where he was formally cautioned, while a shocked-looking young forensics woman wearing a white coat and pale blue latex gloves took swab samples from inside his mouth, his fingernails, his foreskin. He didn’t stop shouting . . . his throat was raw, like he’d swallowed a razor . . . his mind was burning up . . . the room was spinning . . . he was screaming Caitlin’s name . . .

When he heard the forensics woman call for a semen detection kit, it made him roar louder than before . . . made him raise his knees and kick two of the officers holding him down in the face. Now he was banging his own head against the hard floor – if he did violence on himself, perhaps he could stop the agony . . .

Lights and faces danced before his eyes.

He heard the call for a sedative shot and he shouted even more – not words, but strangled animal noises.

For the second time that night he felt a needle slip through his skin . . .

And then darkness once more.

He had no way of knowing how long he was out. When he drifted slowly back into consciousness, he was in a vehicle. It was dark. He was lying on his front on a cold, hard, metallic floor and his hands were tied behind his back. He was wearing only jeans. Bare feet. Bare torso. It was noisy. The floor was vibrating with the movement of the vehicle. The drugs had fully worn off now, but every cell in his body was bulging with pain. His skull throbbed, but that was nothing compared with the agony that exploded in his head when he remembered what had happened. It didn’t matter if he opened his eyes or closed them. All he saw was Caitlin: stricken, brutalized, begging him to help her.

Dead by his hand.

Joe started to dry retch. It would have been better if they’d succeeded in faking his suicide. Then, at least, Conor would be safe. He knew now that somebody was trying to eliminate him. They’d do anything to achieve it. If they could do such a thing to Caitlin, they wouldn’t think twice about targeting his son. He retched again.

Minutes later he pushed himself painfully up to his knees. He figured he was in the back of a secure vehicle about the size of a Transit, maybe a little bigger. On one side there was a small slit in the chassis, the size of a letterbox, with three vertical bars. Getting groggily to his feet, he managed to peer through this peephole. He was on a motorway. Checking the rate at which they passed the cat’s eyes on the hard shoulder, he estimated the speed at 70 mph. The landscape beyond the motorway was enveloped in blackness. He moved to the rear of the van, turned to face the front and felt behind him for any bolts with his bound hands. There was a bar across both doors, like on a fire exit, but it wouldn’t budge. He was locked in from outside. Broken and shuddering, Joe slid once more to the floor in the back of what he guessed was a police van.

He couldn’t read his watch because his wrists were tied behind his back, and there was no way of guessing the time, but it was perhaps two hours after he awoke that the van stopped to refuel. Joe positioned himself by the peephole again. The owner of a Porsche Cayenne was staring in his direction as he refuelled. The guy was lit up – as was the whole service station forecourt – by a blue strobe. Joe realized he must have a police escort. Nobody was taking any chances.

After five minutes they set off again. Joe remained on his feet, looking out of the letterbox, trying to see landmarks he recognized. The angle of his vision made it impossible to read the road signs as they passed, and they had travelled for at least another three hours before he was able to get a bearing: they were crossing the River Thames over the QEII bridge. He counted the lights of four vessels on the river, three heading west, one east. After another half an hour, they turned off what was clearly the M25 and from the motion of the van he calculated that they were heading towards London. It was all the information he needed to work out where they were going.

Remand prison. High security. South-east London. It could only be HMP Barfield.

He’d been there once before, a decade ago. The squadron had been on standby in Hereford when word had come through from the Home Office that the Barfield screws were predicting a riot. They were clearly expecting something big to go off, because the police had requested Regiment support. Sixteen men had travelled down from Hereford to Greenwich and remained in a state of readiness for twenty-four hours. Nothing had happened. Maybe the inmates had got wind that they might have more than a few plods to deal with. Good thing too. Joe and the guys were only ever called into situations that needed the precise and ruthless application of violence. Send a squadron into a Cat A institution – home to some nasty fuckers who made Ronnie and Reggie look like eccentric uncles – and you could be sure of one thing: prison numbers would fall.

The lights above Barfield’s high wire perimeter glowed brightly in the early morning darkness as they approached the entrance. Joe heard a babble of male voices outside, then felt the van move forward again, through the entrance and into an empty reception yard. He tried to estimate the distance they travelled from the gates before stopping. Fifty metres, perhaps. A long way to run, especially with his arms bound behind his back and bare feet. Maybe if he had the element of surprise? Unlikely. He could see flashing lights illuminating the yard. There was a reception party.

He didn’t see the face of the man who opened the back of the vehicle. All he saw were the four armed police, with flak jackets, visored helmets and MP5s, two kneeling five metres back from the van, two standing ten metres behind that. Between the two standing officers was a uniformed screw, tall and thin, carrying a clipboard. ‘Get him in!’ he shouted, his voice echoing in the night. As Joe stood at the vehicle’s exit, squinting against the sudden influx of light from a powerful beam behind the screw, he clocked a look of disgust on the man’s face.

Two more men appeared from the wings. They also wore prison officers’ uniforms, but were burlier than the guy with the clipboard. They pulled Joe roughly from the van, each man taking one of his elbows. Instinctively, Joe wrestled away from them. He was rewarded with a solid truncheon blow in the stomach that knocked the wind from his lungs and bent him double as he was dragged across the yard – his bare heels scraping painfully against the rough tarmac – and into a single-storey brick building, the armed police following some five metres behind.

This first building was little more than a waiting room: five lines of brown plastic chairs and an old vending machine in one corner. There was a door on the far wall, and Joe’s two guards pushed him through it.

In a weird way, the room he found himself in reminded him of the armoury back at Hereford. It wasn’t big – maybe eight metres by five – and there was a long counter with an open doorway into another room behind. There was a desktop computer on the counter, next to which Joe saw what looked like a webcam, and a small flatbed scanner. On the wall behind the counter was a laminated poster entitled ‘Coping with Prison’. At the far end of the room there was a third doorway, this one closed by a heavy metal door studded with bolts and with two keyholes. Apart from Joe and his two guards, the only other person in the room stood behind the counter. He wore a ginger moustache and the bored expression of a clock-watching official. He said three words: ‘Belt, shoelaces, watch.’ Then he looked over the counter and saw Joe’s bare feet and lack of belt. ‘Watch,’ he corrected himself.

Joe gave him a dark look and didn’t move. His hands were still tied behind his back. How the fuck was he supposed to do anything?

The thin screw with the clipboard entered. He took one look at the situation, then nodded at the man behind the counter, who produced a pair of wire cutters and handed them over. ‘We know who you are,’ the thin screw said to Joe in a reedy cockney accent. ‘Let’s not do anything stupid, eh?’

‘I want to see my son.’

‘Tough shit.’

With one squeeze of the cutters, Joe’s hands were free.

Distance to the exit, five metres. Two guards, thin screw, ginger moustache: he could put these four guys down with his bare hands, but he didn’t know what was waiting for him outside. He didn’t move.

‘Watch.’

Joe removed his watch, but kept his eyes on the jobsworth with the moustache. When he placed it on the counter, he saw the man’s face change. Joe looked down at his own hands. His right hand – his knife hand – was blood red, from the fingertips to an inch above the wrist. There was spatter all the way up his arm.

‘Empty your pockets,’ the man said, his lip curled with disgust.

Joe’s eyes flickered to the left. The two guards were standing three metres away, one with his arms folded, the other tapping his truncheon lightly against his right leg. To his right, the thin screw was scribbling something on the clipboard – Joe could hear the sound of his pencil on the paper.

‘Pockets!’ Joe could smell the tobacco on the breath of the man behind the counter. He noticed a signet ring on the little finger of his right hand, and dirt under the fingernails. ‘Come on, I haven’t got all fucking night!’

Joe pulled a five-pound note and a handful of change from the front pocket of his jeans. From the back pocket he removed a folded piece of paper. For a moment he didn’t know what it was, but then he remembered. Conor’s picture, the one his lad had given him in his bedroom back home.

‘You’re not having this,’ Joe muttered, making to put it back in his jeans.

The thug with the truncheon didn’t hesitate. The second blow was even more violent than the first, and Joe felt the paper being ripped from his hands even as he bent double with pain. It took five seconds to grab his breath. When he straightened up, he saw that the man with the moustache had unfolded the paper. With a malicious glint in his watery eyes, he tore it in two, then in two again.

Something snapped in Joe. He hurled himself at the counter, grabbing the officer by his greasy ginger hair and slamming his head down so that it smashed against the counter. The guy cried out. When he stood up again, blood was flowing from his nostrils and he had his hand pressed to his face. Vaguely aware that the thin screw with the clipboard had run from the room at the first sign of trouble, Joe turned to the two guards. They were edging away from him, the thug with the truncheon holding it forward threateningly like a sword. Joe was ready to jump them, but at that moment the armed police officers burst in. Total confusion. Four of them, MP5s dug into their shoulders, shouting at the tops of their voices: ‘
Hit the ground, hit the fucking ground!
’ Joe dropped to his knees, his hands raised, fully expecting the brutal kicks that his two guards now delivered to the side of his stomach with their heavy black boots. The thin screw reappeared behind the armed police, watched for thirty agonizing seconds, before saying ‘Stop!’

The two prison guards straightened up, leaving Joe in a pile on the floor.