After three hours, I was getting suspicious glances from hospital security and I’d learned nothing. Aamir had been universally respected and valued as a young doctor, but nobody had befriended him. Not because of anything they didn’t like, they added quickly, but because he had given so little of himself away. Those who knew anything about his background and culture told me that it would have been highly unusual for him to have a girlfriend. There would probably have been an arranged marriage in line for him: a young girl of good family, perhaps born and brought up in Pakistan, waiting somewhere in the wings.

From the hospital, I went to the Islamia girls school that Aamir’s sister Amelia attended. I watched several dozen girls leave the premises and managed to spot her as she walked past me.

‘Hello, Amelia. I know this is distressing, but I really want to find out what happened to your brother,’ I said.

After the first shock of recognition, she refused to look me in the eye. ‘We know what happened to my brother,’ she replied to the air just to the left of my shoulder. ‘And we know at whose hands. You simply do not have the competence to prove it.’

According to the file, this girl was fourteen.

‘I just want to find out a bit more about his life,’ I tried again. ‘Siblings often confide in each other. Tell each other things they wouldn’t tell their parents.’

A shudder seemed to run through her entire body. ‘Dutiful sons and daughters keep nothing from their parents,’ she told me.

‘Can you think of anyone I can talk to?’ I asked. ‘Anyone he was friends with? I’ve been to the hospital, but no one seems to have known him very well, although they all speak highly of him.’

She continued to look past me, as though if she concentrated hard enough I would just disappear.

‘He challenged those men in the newsagent’s shop last year,’ she said angrily. ‘He saw them stealing and he kept them there until the police arrived. His courage got him killed.’

‘We know that he was brave,’ I said. ‘Everyone I’ve spoken to admired him. It’s important to us that we find out what happened.’

‘Just words.’ She tried to push past me.

‘I saw a woman last night in the park where he died. A veiled woman. Was it you?’

Her eyes met mine then. She was shocked, maybe a bit scared, and I pressed home my advantage.

‘Amelia, he was a young man. Cultural and religious constraints aside, he must have had a life.’

‘Amelia!’ The woman pushing her way towards us wasn’t someone I recognized. She was older than the girls around us – someone’s mother, maybe, or older sister. She and Amelia had a rapid exchange in Urdu. Then the older woman faced me.

‘You will excuse us now,’ she said. ‘If you have more questions, you must ask Amelia’s parents.’

Taking Amelia by the shoulder, she steered her away and the two of them walked off down the street.

12

‘YOU’LL BE IN a whole heap of shit if anyone finds out you’ve done this,’ said Emma.

‘I know,’ I agreed, staring at the door with the chipped blue paintwork. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

We were in my car outside the home of Paul and Robert Bailey, two of the suspects in the Aamir Chowdhury murder. The Bailey brothers, nineteen and twenty-two respectively, lived with their mother and several younger siblings in a council flat roughly a mile from the park where Aamir had died. The woman in the passenger seat was Emma Boston, a freelance journalist whom I’d met in September, when the killer terrorizing London had used us both as pawns in an increasingly disturbing and violent game. Emma wasn’t a friend – I don’t make friends – but she was someone I was learning to respect and trust. More importantly, she wasn’t afraid to break the rules occasionally.

Both Bailey brothers had been in trouble in the past. In addition to the incident in Karim’s shop, the elder, Robert, had spent six months in prison for handling stolen goods and a similar length of time in a young offenders’ institution for selling class B drugs. Paul, the younger brother, was the nasty one. Along with a string of charges and cautions in the five years that he’d been known to the local police, Paul had been the main suspect in the brutal beating of a young Asian man twelve months earlier. No one had any doubts that he’d done it, but the evidence to prosecute just hadn’t been there and he’d walked free.

It took a long time for anyone to answer Emma’s knock. Eventually, the door was opened by an emaciated, wan-faced woman with two inches of grey roots showing in her dyed black hair. She could have been in her early sixties. We knew, because we’d checked, that the boys’ mother was thirty-nine. We explained that we were reporters, working on a story about wrongful arrests, but she didn’t seem to be taking much in. In fact, she’d been about to close the door on us when Emma mentioned the possibility of a fee. The prospect of cash worked like a charm and we were shown along a dark corridor lined with cardboard boxes and into a poky room that smelled of stale beer, smoke and body odours I didn’t want to think too much about. There were three men in the room. Emma showed them her press pass and introduced herself.

Whilst we talked, the mother sat huddled in a chair in the corner, her eyes flickering from the TV screen to us and back again. I’m not sure she took in anything much.

Although I’d seen photographs, it was difficult at first to tell which Bailey brother was which. Both were around five foot nine or ten, with a muscular build that was verging on fat and the grey complexion of people who’ve never eaten a vegetable in their lives. One had a slightly twisted face, the other a higher hairline. I learned after a few minutes that the twisted face with the dark-blue hooded sweatshirt was Paul. Robert had the receding hair and was wearing an Arsenal shirt with ketchup stains down the front. There was a third man in the room, whom we recognized as twenty-year-old Daniel Fisher, another of the five suspects, who lived near by.

Emma had introduced me, as we’d agreed, as her assistant, without giving my name. My role was to observe, make notes and keep as quiet as possible. If these three men were guilty, they and I had had a very close encounter in the park that night. I wanted to get a closer look, to hear their voices, see if anything rang a bell. More importantly, I was keeping a sharp lookout for any sign that they recognized me. So far as I could tell, there had been nothing from either Bailey brother. They’d glanced at me and then turned their attention to Emma. Fisher, though, was a different story. He was watching me.

If we learned anything today, Emma would pass it on to Tulloch. Her reward, if anything came of it, would be a story.

‘I’m looking into the possibility that you were set up,’ said Emma, as the Bailey boys fidgeted, scratched and sniffed. Fisher kept his eyes on me and on the notepad on my lap. ‘Due to pressure to meet targets, the Met have been keeping lists of young white men believed to have been involved in racial incidents in the past.’

Robert Bailey pulled his face into something between a sneer and a sulk.

‘We think it’s quite likely,’ Emma went on, ‘that when something more serious occurs, the Met go through the list, find faces that seem to fit and tailor the facts to achieve an early result.’

It was complete nonsense, but we needed these three to trust us. The younger Bailey brother enthusiastically agreed that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if Emma was completely right and that he’d long suspected as much himself. Of course, he didn’t use quite those words.

Fisher was still watching me. In fairness, though, he seemed more interested in what I was writing than in my face.