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pub, turned the wrong corner, strolled blithely through an estate in the wrong postcode. It was understandable, being scared of boys with knives or men with bombs, but what people really needed to be frightened about was simply being unlucky.
    ‘There’ll be armed police outside by now, won’t there?’ Mitchell looked towards the back door. ‘Snipers or whatever. I’ve seen this kind of thing on the news.’
    Helen said that she thought there would be a Firearms Unit on standby, that they would probably be sealing off the shop. She told him that whoever was running things outside would know what they were doing.
    ‘So what are they likely to do?’ Mitchell lowered his voice still further. ‘What’s normally the plan with things like this?’
    ‘There isn’t one,’ Helen said.
    ‘Oh … OK.’
    ‘It’s always different and there isn’t any set … protocol. They’ll wait and see what happens.’
    Mitchell seemed to take this on board, the idea that, in all probability, nothing would happen quickly. But Helen could see that he was far from reassured and she could hardly blame him. Aside from Akhtar unlocking their handcuffs, opening the shutters and letting them walk out of there, anything that happened was likely to be dangerous for all concerned.
    She sat back and listened. Akhtar had stopped moving around, but then she heard the tell-tale sound of pages being turned.
    ‘He’s reading the paper,’ Mitchell whispered. ‘Looking through the paper like nothing’s happening.’
    Helen was still trying to decide how Akhtar himself was handling things, how he was coping. She knew it was important. Could this man who held a gun as though it were a poisonous snake really be that calm? Or was he making as much effort as possible to appear that way?
    Whatever the truth was, and whatever Tom Thorne was up to on the outside, they needed Javed Akhtar to remain calm if they were going to stay safe. She and the man from the bank would need to do everything they could to keep him relaxed.
    They stiffened when the newsagent appeared suddenly in the doorway. He raised a hand, as though apologising for worrying them. Then he calmly laid the gun down on the desk and asked if they wanted tea.
    Thorne was in the playground, on the phone.
    He had already called Brigstocke to bring him up to speed and to ensure that all the paperwork pertaining to the suicide at Barndale be sent across to his office at Becke House. He had also requested that a copy of the post-mortem be faxed to Phil Hendricks as soon as possible. Finally, Thorne had told Brigstocke to make contact with whoever had led the original inquiry into Amin Akhtar’s death and ask the officer to call him immediately.
    To his credit, DI Martin Dawes had called back within ten minutes.
    ‘Did you not think it might be a good idea to let us know what had happened to Amin Akhtar?’ Thorne asked.
    ‘It wasn’t connected with your manslaughter case.’
    ‘Just as a courtesy, then.’
    Dawes was clearly not the type to give ground. ‘So you always need to know what’s happened to everyone you’ve put away, do you?’
    There were a few – the ones who had genuinely scared him – that Thorne would always keep a close eye on, but Dawes had a fair point. Besides, Thorne did not have time for a pissing contest.
    ‘Can you run me through it?’
    Dawes told Thorne that Amin Akhtar had killed himself with a drug overdose two months earlier, that he was found dead in Barndale’s hospital wing. His body had been discovered first thing in the morning and he had been pronounced dead at the scene by the YOI doctor.
    ‘What was he doing in the hospital wing?’
    ‘He’d been assaulted four days before by another boy. Had his face sliced open, basically.’
    ‘Enough reason to suddenly top himself?’ Thorne asked. ‘I mean he’d already been in there, what, seven months?’
    ‘He’d also been raped,’ Dawes said.
    ‘In the hospital wing?’
    ‘Could have been. The