Barry shrugs. ‘OK, if you’re sure. What d’you think, kids?’
‘It will be great for them,’ says Sharon. ‘A chance to meet some of the children on the close – the ones who don’t go to Bishop Christopher’s.’ She turns back to the juicer and turns it on again. The mixture starts to jump and spin, turning into a greenish mucus that slides stickily down the plastic when she flips off the switch.
‘What time will you be back tonight?’
Barry hesitates. ‘Could be a late one. I’m at a site meeting in Guildford this afternoon. It may run on. What about you, princess?’ he says, turning to his daughter. ‘You get that English test result today, right? Bet it’ll be top marks again. Nothing else is good enough for my special girl.’
Daisy smiles briefly at her father before returning to her cereal. ‘Leo was picked for the football team.’
Barry raises his eyebrows. ‘Is that so? Why didn’t you say so, son?’
Leo shrugs. ‘It’s only the reserves.’
Barry’s face falls. ‘Oh well, just shows you need to try a bit harder. Like I said.’
Sharon is still absorbed in the intricacies of the juicer, which appears reluctant to be dismantled. ‘OK. I’ll leave you something cold for when you get back. Don’t forget, my aerobics is at eight.’
Barry smiles broadly at Daisy. ‘Make sure you bring that test result home so I can see it, eh, Dais?’
Sharon glances round. ‘I do wish you’d use her proper name, Barry. How can we stop her friends calling her that, if they hear her father doing the same?’
Barry reaches across and tousles his daughter’s hair. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Dais?’
‘And remember to give that make-up bag back to Mrs Chen when you see her at school today, Daisy. Tell her thank you, but we can afford to buy our own things.’
‘I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way,’ says Barry. ‘They just had two the same, and thought Dais would like one.’
‘I don’t care. Make-up isn’t appropriate. Not for a girl her age. It just looks common.’
‘Oh, come on, it’s just a bit of fun. You know what girls are like – dressing up and stuff.’
‘I told you, it’s not appropriate. And in any case, we don’t need their charity.’
Barry tries to catch his daughter’s eye but Daisy appears intent on her cereal. Then he pushes back his stool and gets up. ‘Don’t go to too much trouble tonight,’ he says to Sharon. ‘A sandwich will do. Tuna or something.’ He picks up his briefcase and keys, and unhitches his high-viz jacket from the back of a chair. ‘I’m off then. Bye, kids.’
When the kitchen door closes, Daisy puts down her spoon and carefully smooths her hair back down with both hands. Leo edges off his stool and goes up to his mother. ‘Who will you be inviting to the party?’
‘Oh, you know, the neighbours, your classmates,’ she says, pouring the smoothie into a glass.
‘What about that boy Dad knows?’ says Leo.
‘What boy?’ says Sharon distractedly. By the time she has rinsed the juicer and turned back to her children, Leo has gone.
*
The Rahija home is identical to a thousand others in that part of East Oxford. Pebbledashed thirties semi with a bay window at ground and first floor. There’s a garage door at the side with most of the paint peeled off, apart from the abuse someone’s spray-canned across it. Someone who can’t spell ‘paedophile’. One first-floor window is boarded up, and there are six wheelie bins in the front garden, two of them tipped over, with trash and rotting food spilling over the concrete.
I have a team blocking off the alley at the back, and there are a dozen of us at the front. One of them has a battering ram. I nod to him and he hammers on the door.
‘Police, open up!’
There are sounds inside at once – women screaming and a male voice shouting in a language that’s not English. A baby starts to wail.
‘I said Police – open the door or we’ll break it down!’
A minute passes, perhaps two, then there’s a scrabbling noise on the woodwork and the door opens a couple of inches. It’s a woman in a headscarf. She can’t be more than twenty.
‘What do you want? Can’t you leave us alone? We haven’t done anything.’
I step forward. ‘I am Detective Inspector Adam Fawley of Thames Valley CID. We have a warrant to search these premises. Please open the door. It will be much better for everyone if we can carry this out in a civilized manner.’
‘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.’