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I remember clearly Rafi’s elder brother, Asif, walking me up and down this street, proudly showing me the sights, revelling in the seclusion. He pointed out a newsagents, the only business on the street that was owned by a non-Muslim. I remember it being empty at the time, as a result of it being boycotted. Seeing it now, through my windscreen, it was boarded-up, out of business. Job done.
Across the road to my right, fifty metres or so in front of me, I could just make out the outline to the Kabirs’ semi-detached home. I scanned for police presence, for the press that had set up camp outside the house after the attack. It had been widely reported by the media that Rafi was a cleanskin. He wasn’t affiliated to any terrorist group or known in any capacity to MI5 or counter-terrorism. His family were looked at closely, but ultimately they also didn’t appear on any watchlists. They hid their connections well. The press frenzy eventually fizzled out after Saheed Kabir had given his tearful doorstep interview to the world’s media, about the tragic loss of his youngest son. His pain was genuine, even though his words weren’t. His emotion blended easily with defiance as he stated that Rafi was innocent, and had been subjected to religious indoctrination from the day that he had gone missing to the day he took his own life. Not once mentioning that his innocent son had taken innocent lives. As for religious indoctrination, Rafi had been indoctrinated a long time before he went missing. By his father, his mother and his brother, who raised and nurtured him to exact madness against those who opposed their beliefs. The Kafir.
I couldn’t wait any longer. The thought of Saheed’s emotion in front of the cameras fuelled mine, and my body moved of its own accord. I don’t remember stepping out of my car. I don’t remember tucking the Glock into the waist of my trousers and slipping the suppressor in my inside pocket. All I know is that I was striding through the snow, the plastic food bags secured tightly over my shoes and hands with elastic bands.
The weather had picked up. The gentle fall of snow was now torrential rain, dropping from a black cloud that would forever follow me. I pulled my baseball cap low and my scarf high. It gave little protection against the strong wet wind, biting into me, trying to blow me back the way I came.
God’s way.
But me and Him, we were no longer talking.
I lifted my eyes and through the storm I glanced at number 65 across the road. My eyes furtive and busy, taking in everything. Upstairs the bedrooms lights were on, shining a ray through the gap in the curtains. Downstairs, the living room light was off, but the glare of the television through the net curtains illuminated one figure.
I dropped my gaze and moved past the house. Further down, two houses next to each other had their lights switched off. Number 71 and number 73. Only a metal gate between the two houses separated them. I crossed the road and without breaking stride I rested one foot on the metal gate and scaled over. I hurried around to the rear of the house and into the back garden. The fences were head-height but the adrenaline made me feel light as I lifted myself over with ease. I ducked low under washing lines as I crossed from garden to garden to garden, until I was standing in the Kabirs’ garden.
I craned my neck up. Upstairs the toilet light came on.
I pressed myself to the house and sidestepped to the back door. I peered inside, through the frosted window. No movement, just the muted sound of the television. I removed the Glock from my waist and wrapped the tail of my scarf around the butt of the gun and then tapped it firmly against the window. The glass fell gently onto the kitchen mat on the other side. I put my hand through; the glass cutting into my forearm caused me no pain. My hand landed on the lock. I turned it and stepped inside their home as glass crunched under my shoes.
I looked around the kitchen as I attached the suppressor to the Glock. It was dark but I could make out a tower of mismatched Tupperware on the worktop. The neighbours. They would have rallied around at this tragic time and forced home-cooked meals into the hands of the Kabirs. I moved out of the kitchen and into the narrow hallway. Flashes of light and music from the television travelled from the living room. I stopped halfway into the hallway as an unwelcome memory hit me and I stood staring, just as I had eight months ago. Hung on the wall, the Ayut-al-Kursi in swirling Arabic written and engraved in wood. A prayer that once meant so much to me and was threatening to do so again. I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped my gun tightly and let them in again.
Smiling. Laughing. Living. Dying.
I exhaled hard and walked past the prayer without another look. With the Glock in my grip hanging low by my side, I stepped into the living room.
To my left the television was tuned into a music channel, heavy drum and bass accompanied by flashing lights. I turned to my right. Rafi’s older brother, Asif, had already leaped up from his armchair and was hurtling towards me, the flashing from the television made his movements appear jerky. He cut the distance quickly. I blinked as a tight fist gripped around a remote control came towards me, connecting just above my eye, knocking my baseball cap off. I absorbed it. No pain. No fucking pain! The batteries dropped out of the remote and cracked loudly on the laminate floor. A second blow, same place, and I felt a trickle of blood above my eyebrow. I switched the Glock from my left to right hand and swiped across, blindly catching Asif flush on the jaw and dropping him. He looked up at me. Anger turned to recognition and then realisation.
‘Imran?’ he said, getting himself up on his knees. He spat out a bloody tooth. I lifted the Glock and pointed it to his chest. ‘I couldn’t have known… I didn’t know Rafi was going to—’
I pulled the trigger and felt the bullet travelling through my heart and through my arm and popping quietly out of my hand and into his heart.
Asif dropped back, his head meeting the floor with his legs still tucked underneath his body. I breathed in three times through my nose and out of my mouth.
I would not let the guilt in. He had a hand in this.
I turned away and moved out of the living room. I passed framed family photos hung on the wall as I slowly climbed the stairs, the last of the family’s memories. I stood on the landing, the Glock impatiently tapping against my leg. To the left, a light seeped underneath the bathroom door. To the right, a bedroom, door ajar. I pushed it open slowly. The room was lit dimly from a small football-shaped table lamp. Rafi’s room.
By the side of the bed, Rafi’s mother was standing on a prayer mat, hands clasped against her chest, her face a picture of peace. I watched her for a moment, just as I’d watched my Khala pray so many times. She moved her hands to her knees as she bent down towards Mecca, and then knelt in the Sajdah position, her forehead touching the floor as she recited Subhana Rabbiyal A’laa, three times.
The Glock twitched in my hand.
She sat up, back straight, such was the discipline, she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the prayer mat even though there was no doubt that she would have noticed in her peripheral vision a stranger in her home.
She turned her head slowly over her right shoulder to the angel who records good deeds and softy whispered, ‘As-salamu-alaykum Rahmattulah.’ She turned her head slowly over her left shoulder to the angel who records wrongful deeds and softly whispered, ‘As-salamu-alaykum Rahmattulah.’ It signalled the end of prayers.
She folded the prayer mat twice over and got to her feet. Turning her back to me, she placed the mat on the bookshelf, amongst Islamic literature mixed in with comics. She sat down on Rafi’s bed, her hands clasped together on her lap, and for the first time lifted her eyes to me. She nodded.
The gun felt heavy as I lifted my arm and pointed it at her. I nodded back and shot her in the chest. She fell to her side, her head finding her son’s pillow.
I would not let the guilt in. She had a hand in this.
I stepped out of the bedroom and waited on the landing for Saheed Kabir, faithful servant of Ghurfat-al-Mudarris. A man who helped fight a war that to many was justified. He was a small part of a huge movement, one that had become too powerful in the battle against the West, against the deaths of innocent Muslims across the world. He was a man who had educated his two sons with nothing but hatred towards the West and hatred towards the Kafir.
In the eyes of his ten-year-old son, I was that Kafir. I was that Munafiq. I was that traitor.
I heard the sound of the flush and then the sound of running water. I lifted the Glock and pointed it at the toilet door. The water stopped, the handle turned and the door opened.
Saheed met my gaze before his eyes moved towards the bedroom, then back on me. Filled with dread, his mouth moved, a silent question on his lips.
I answered it with a slow shake of my head.
Saheed fell heavily to his knees, a tear escaping from his eyes as his obese body shook and shuddered. ‘Asif?’ His voice barely above a whisper. ‘My son?’
I shook my head again and his howl deafened me as tears flooded his eyes.
‘My family,’ he cried, at my feet. ‘You took away my family.’
‘You took away mine.’
I shot him twice in the chest.
I would not let the guilt in. Saheed Kabir had a hand in this.
Chapter 7
Sophia looked up at Easedale House, the tired-looking tower block standing tall but unremarkable amongst the surrounding identical tower blocks that filled the landscape within Brentford’s Ivy Bridge Estate. Brentford had undergone – or was in the middle of – a regeneration project; Sophia wasn’t sure which. It had been ongoing for years. Her crappy flat in her crappy tower block was a few minutes’ walk away from the flats on the waterfront with price-tags she could never dream of affording. Nine figures had been spent on the regeneration, but not a drop on the Ivy Bridge Estate. Sophia despised having to walk past the smell of the rich, so close to her shit-hole flat.
Not even entertaining the idea of the piss-stinking lift, Sophia trudged up three floors. She walked past a whiny malnourished Alsatian tied to the railing on the first floor, and nodded curtly at a neighbour slumped on the landing of the second floor, who, judging by his eyes and blank stare, looked as if he’d fallen off whatever wagon he had been on. She entered the lobby of the third floor and let herself into her apartment. She closed the door behind her and double-locked it, aware that the cheap Homebase locks wouldn’t withstand force. The door probably wouldn’t even withstand somebody leaning against it.
As per routine, Sophia picked up the iron bar on the small hallway table and gripped it firmly in both hands as she walked from room to room, checking for chancers. She entered the bedroom last, dropped the bar on the side table and shrugged off her coat, letting it fall in a puddle at her feet. An ancient desktop PC sat on a desk in the corner of the room. Sophia lifted the monitor off the computer and placed it to the side. Her heart picked up as she clicked the two catches on the side of the PC and lifted the cover. Inside, sitting on the motherboard, right beside the hard drive, was a small stack of fifty pound notes, amounting to exactly ten thousand pounds. She sighed with relief, clicked the cover back in place and sat the monitor on top of the computer. And then, as she did every night after a shift, fell backwards with her arms out onto her unmade double bed, enjoying the thrill of her body bouncing gently before coming to rest. Strands of blonde hair fell across her face. She blew them away from her eyes and stared up at the damp patch on the ceiling, lit by the two working downlights. It was not a view she would get used to.
Sophia Hunt had arrived in London, aged 22, clutching hopefully onto her Performing Arts Diploma. She’d waited patiently for the opportunity – that one successful audition that would kick-start her career and give her the chance to live life on her own terms. Meanwhile, she worked hard as a cleaner. No, that’s not right. She worked as a cleaner, but the effort was minimal, as were the wages and tips. Sophia’s mother had been a cleaner. So had her grandmother. Was it predetermined for Sophia to end up on her hands and knees, with a J-cloth and a backache, and to serve those who felt it was open season to grab, grope and fondle the fucking help?
Sophia’s father had been a social worker, before he injured himself, accidentally-on-purpose, and pissed off with his benefits. He wasn’t big on sharing-is-caring. Sophia didn’t blame him. At least he’d had some semblance of get-up-and-go when he’d got up and left.
Her mother, not able to afford childcare, dragged Sophia to her cleaning jobs, from the age of seven through to her teenage years. She couldn’t bear to watch her mother crawl around grand homes with her bad back and her bad knees, making the place gleam whilst pocketing items that wouldn’t be missed. It made Sophia sad. Sad to watch her mum. Sad that they were surrounded by money but didn’t have any.
She died of a heart attack on the job, with an apron full of silverware. Sophia promised herself that she would not end up in the same position. But she was going up against life and patterns and a history of bloody cleaners in her family.
Sophia put in her all to achieve her Performing Arts Diploma, sacrificing sleep to study lines, skipping meals to stay skinny, taking extra classes to help improve her singing and dancing. But it had become quite evident, fairly soon after she’d arrived in London, that she was just one of a million starlets who shared that same hunger.
Working as an extra on TV wasn’t as exciting as it had seemed. Hours of waiting around with all the other desperados, eating yesterday’s sandwiches, until she was called to aimlessly sit in a coffee shop or a pub whilst the A-listers blocked her view of the camera. Regardless, she gave it everything, made each role her own. Once she had to push a pram across the road and she did it method. Making sure the road was clear as any mother would, looking left, looking right, and then left again, before tentatively crossing over, only for the director to shout, ‘Cut! Just cross the bloody road!’
Her diploma meant nothing, on top of which she couldn’t remember where she’d put it, and these days all the networks could afford to make was reality TV. Brain-dead airheads with no qualifications or discernible talent, catering for the brain-dead viewer. Despite herself, Sophia adjusted, realising that it may be her only path to success, a platform from which she could showcase her talent to the world. She applied for the lot, and was turned down by the lot. Her only success, if you could call it that, came as she got through to the second round of The X Factor and the judges had to decide between her and some singing clown who couldn’t hold a note for toffee. After some pretty dramatic deliberating, the judges chose the singing clown who sang sad songs with a frown.
Over the years, casual employment and the odd shoplifting spree helped her keep her head above water. She started to decline TV extra work, it was beneath her, and concentrated on promoting her talents on social media. Her presence was heavily felt on every platform by her twenty-three followers, who, if she was honest, were dirty old men, ogling her. She had lived in hope that a music producer or a film director would spot her undeniable talent, but all she’d received was creepy direct messages and dick pics.
And just as she was coming to another realisation – that the cleaning, the waitressing, the odd temping job, was no longer a stop gap, but just a stop – a man had entered her life and presented her with an opportunity.
It had been five days since Sophia had found the handset on her doorstep. She wasn’t expecting it, and her first and second thoughts were that it had been wrongly delivered, and how much could she sell it for. She’d frowned when she noticed it was an old throwaway Nokia phone with physical push buttons, screen the size of a matchbox and no camera. It was worth next to nothing. She’d flipped it over and attached to the back of it was a small silver key and a white card. In neat handwriting the card read: Call me. With growing curiosity Sophia did just that.
A polite gentleman had answered. He told her his name was Samuel Carter. He sounded like a Samuel Carter, too, as though he had been brought up well, educated the expensive way, and never been referred to as Sam or Sammy. It was a particular quirk of Sophia’s that whenever she met somebody new, or spoke to them on the phone, afterwards she would take her time deciding whether their name matched their face or voice. She had done this ever since she realised that her own name was so far from the mark. When you hear Sophia, you expect grace and glamour and a few quid in the bank. You don’t expect a grubby apron and a damp ceiling and the high rise of Ivy Bridge Estate. And her surname: Hunt. Posh! As though she had come from old money, rather than a mob of cleaners and fraudsters.
Samuel had informed Sophia that he had located her online, sifting through her various profiles on social media. Samuel Carter wasn’t in a position to help her further her non-existent career, but he was in the position to help her. Why he chose her, she didn’t know or ask, but she was aware enough to realise that her online presence exuded a certain desperation and a willingness.
The job he had presented to her was easy, low-risk and with a pay-off to the tune of fifty thousand pounds. Ten that had already been delivered after their one and only conversation, left in a locker at Metro Bank – that’s what the key attached to the phone was for. The money was there in a small bundle of fifty pound notes, which she had pocketed and transported safely back home and hidden amongst the guts of her computer. Samuel hadn’t been in touch since.
Sophia reached across to her cabinet and from the drawer picked out the pay-as-you-go Nokia handset. She turned it on and waited a long minute for any alerts to come through. When that didn’t transpire, panic didn’t quite set in, but it was nearby. Had Samuel changed his mind?
Sophia shuffled up on the bed and rested her head back against the creaky headboard. She tried to relax, tried breathing techniques to force the panic from knocking on the door. If Samuel didn’t get in touch, then what? Was it still on for tomorrow? Worst case, she still had ten thousand pounds. But ten wasn’t exactly fifty. She’d already spent the fifty in her head. She was going to update her portfolio and replace cheaply taken selfies with professional shots. Then she’d hire a music studio and lay down the tracks that she’d been writing since she was thirteen and finally direct and star in her very own, high-production music video, possibly in Paris, possibly Rome, and share the hell out of it, until someone important sat up and took notice. Hadn’t Justin Bieber got noticed online? She would stretch every penny of that fifty thousand pounds. She’d give it her best shot. Her last shot.
Sophia checked the phone signal, five solid bars stared proudly back at her. She checked the volume. She even called it using her own phone, and it rang loudly in her hand. Sophia considered her options. Samuel had treated her like an equal, she reasoned. It wasn’t just a set of instructions, he had actually asked her for advice about the task ahead. Just like a partner. A business partner. She stared at his phone number. He hadn’t said not to call, and surely one partner should be able to call the other.
Sophia pressed dial and butterflies the size of bats fluttered and danced away in the pit of her stomach. She cleared her throat several times as it rang once, twice, three times, before abruptly being cut off by a smarmy automated voice, telling her that Samuel Carter had found somebody better suited, or words to that effect.
‘Shit!’
Sophia disconnected the call as the butterflies vacated, leaving her stomach feeling cold and empty. She stared at the phone until the screen dimmed.
‘Shit!’
The small screen came to life and the unexpected ringing made her jump.
‘Oh, shit!’
The butterflies were back with a vengeance, and they’d brought their butterfly friends with them. ‘Hello,’ she answered carefully.
‘I apologise,’ he said, and she thought she heard the slightest of accents, which hadn’t been evident the last time they spoke. He lost it by clearing his throat. ‘I had to find a quiet spot.’
‘Oh, yeah, yep, yes. No problem. Not. A. Problem,’ she replied, aiming for nonchalance but getting nowhere near it. She cleared her throat loudly and wondered how disgusting it would’ve sounded.
‘You called, Sophia,’ he said. ‘I trust everything is okay?’
She loved how he said her name, like it was meant to be said. Samuel waited patiently and Sophia had to switch on and recall why she’d called. Why had she called?
‘Are we definitely on for tomorrow? It’s just I hadn’t heard anything.’
‘Yes, Sophia. We are planning to go ahead tomorrow, as discussed. But, as I said before, it’s entirely your call. If you feel that you may encounter logistical issues, then, by all means, we can further discuss or… We can abort.’
She had never before, not once, been spoken to like that. He valued her opinion. He actually valued the value of her opinion. Sophia smiled as she wiggled her big toe through the hole in her tights. They were partners. Partners in crime! As for logistical issues, all she had to do was leave the patio door unlocked, turn a blind eye, and then deal with the fallout with the police.
‘I can’t see there being any logistical issues,’ Sophia replied. Check me out, talking logistics, she thought. ‘I think we should proceed.’
‘Excellent, Sophia,’ Samuel said. ‘It’s been a delight dealing with you. Now, I’m sorry to say that this will be the last time that you and I shall be speaking.’
‘Oh,’ she said, her heart taking a sideways dive. She wasn’t sure why.
‘I’m afraid so. After this call, can you possibly delete this phone number and call register and dispose of the cell phone discreetly.’
‘Yeah, sure. I’ll dash it. Like, an outside bin? Or even in the river?’ Sophia said, enjoying the drama of throwing away incriminating evidence in the river in the cold of the night, right under the noses of where the rich lived.
‘Outside bin is fine. Just as long as the cell is cleared.’
‘Okay,’ she said, nodding thoughtfully to herself, as she recalled the Jason Bourne movie she’d seen the previous night. ‘Should I take it apart piece by piece and put the battery in one bin, and the other bit in another bin, maybe on another street. And the sim card… I could destroy the sim card by frying it.’
Sophia thought she heard a sigh.
‘It’s fine to throw it away in one piece. It’s unregistered.’
‘If you’re sure,’ Sophia said, slightly cut. Maybe she was trying too hard. She should just say as little as possible, though that had never been her style. She had to think about number one. ‘When do I get the rest of the money?’ Sophia asked, carefully.
‘A second key for a second locker will be posted to your address. The same as last time. The remainder of the fee will be there.’
Sophia had no reason to doubt Samuel Carter.
Chapter 8
Jay