Close to Home (DI Adam Fawley #1)(55)
‘Civilized? You come here, beating down the door, terrifying my mother and my children, and you claim to be civilized?’
A crowd is gathering in the street now, most of them young Asian men, some in kufis. I see Quinn reach to his truncheon. The mood is getting ugly. I don’t want a riot on my hands.
‘Look, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. Let us in and I give you my word we will make every effort to do what we have to as quickly and with as little disruption as possible. But be in no doubt, if I have to break down the door, I will, and that’ll mean your name in the papers and all the abuse you got last year starting up all over again. I can’t believe you want that any more than I do. But you need to decide, and decide now.’
The grip on the door loosens. I make eye contact – force her to look at me – and, eventually, she nods. I can scarcely breathe for the pounding in my chest. I turn and gesture the uniform team to back off to the pavement.
Then I beckon Brenda, the Community Liaison Officer. ‘Can you make sure the women and children aren’t unduly frightened. Quinn – you and Gislingham come with me.’
Even in this weather, the front room smells of damp. Discoloured wallpaper is hanging off the walls and there’s an old gas fire in the hearth that has deathtrap written all over it. Even without the four of us, the room is crowded. There are two older women in black sitting on the sagging sofa and keening backwards and forwards, and three younger mothers, their arms round their children. The kids are looking at us with huge wary eyes. I smile at one of them and she smiles back, before burying her face in her mother’s niqab. There are no men.
Behind me, I hear Quinn direct Gislingham through into the back room and the kitchen, and Quinn himself takes the stairs, two at a time. Then I hear him on the floorboards above.
‘Boss?’ he calls. ‘Up here.’
The cigarette smoke should warn me, and at some subliminal level, it does. I reach the landing and round the corner. There are two sets of bunk beds in a room barely big enough for a single, and Azeem Rahija is sitting cross-legged on one of the lower ones. I know it’s him because I’ve seen his brother, but there’s something less hardened about this kid, something that gives me a flicker of hope that he hasn’t yet gone the same way. But then I look in the face of the other person in the room. Sitting on the top bunk, smoking, his legs swinging as if he was still a little boy.
‘Afternoon, ocifers,’ he says, his voice slurring slightly. There’s a four-pack of Strongbow lying beside him. He’s not as attractive as he appeared on the footage. Distance makes the hair look blonder, clearly. And he has a scatter of acne about his chin and cheeks. But it’s his manner that unmakes him – the devious, narrowed eyes, the self-satisfaction. The crotch of his jeans is hanging near his knees, and he has one of those earrings that make a hole the size of your finger. They always make me feel slightly ill.
He takes a draw on his fag and blows smoke at me.
‘I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,’ I say, echoing his tone. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Adam Fawley. And you are?’
He grins unpleasantly and points at me, not quite managing to keep his finger steady. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
‘DS Quinn, take this child out to the car. And if he’s still refusing to divulge his name, get a social worker organized. There’s no way this boy is sixteen.’
There’s a rather unseemly scuffle, but Quinn has a foot and several stone on his side. The kid’s already yelping about ‘brutality’ as I follow the two of them back to the landing and call Gislingham up.
‘Start the search in there. There’s at least one laptop hidden in the bedclothes.’
When I turn to look back at Azeem I think it’s quite possible he’s shat himself.
*
Interview with Barry Mason, conducted at St Aldate’s Police Station, Oxford
23 July 2016, 12.42 p.m.
In attendance, DI A. Fawley, Acting DS G. Quinn, Miss E. Carwood (solicitor)
EC: Are we to take it that you are ready to press charges?
AF: We still have some questions to ask your client, Miss Carwood.
EC: In relation to the pornography allegations?
AF: For the moment, yes.
EC: Very well. But may I remind you, the clock is ticking.
AF: Mr Mason, are you in contact with an individual by the name of Azeem Rahija?
BM: I haven’t a bloody clue who you’re talking about.
EC: Are we talking about the same family as Yasir and Sunni Rahija?
BM: What, those Asian paedophiles who were in the papers? Of course I bloody well don’t know them. Jesus Christ.
AF: Azeem Rahija is the younger brother of Yasir Rahija. He’s seventeen.
BM: So?
AF: So you have never had any contact with him, or any of his family? You’ve never accessed pornography from them –
BM: How many more bloody times. I don’t buy porn. Not from them, or anyone else. I’ve bought the odd girlie mag, but that’s it. End of. Go on - check my phone – check my bloody PC – you won’t find any of that shit on it.
AF: Unfortunately the hard drive on your computer was destroyed in the fire. We have no way of knowing what was on it. Or what might have been erased. We have to tell you, however, that we’ve found two videos on your mobile phone. Videos which contain extreme and sexually explicit images of young children –