‘I’m sorry about before,’ Akhtar said. ‘When I got so worked up. I could see that it was upsetting you.’
‘It’s fine, I understand,’ Helen said.
‘No, it’s not fine.’ He was still sitting at the desk, but the tension had gone from his face. He moved his chair a little closer to her. ‘I seem to have lost control over the way I respond to things. Does that make any sense?’
Helen told him that it did.
‘I always used to think carefully about things first, you know? Whatever happened, good news or bad news, it would take a while to sink in and feel real, but these days everything is speeded up. Everything is more intense, much brighter, much darker. I’m absurdly happy or far more miserable. Very much angrier… ’
‘Your son went to prison,’ Helen said. ‘Then he died, was killed, so you’re not going to feel normal about anything.’
‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘Of course you’re not.’ She was still wary, aware that the mood Akhtar was in at that moment might not be the same one he would be in five minutes from now, but she needed to do everything possible to keep him where he was. To maintain the calm. ‘ This is hardly… normal, is it?’
Akhtar shook his head, ran a hand slowly across the top of it.
‘One man is already dead, Javed.’
He nodded, solemn. ‘If I was reading about something like this in one of my papers,’ Akhtar said, ‘I would despise the person doing it. I would talk about what was happening with Nadira and in the shop with my customers, and we would all shake our heads and tut-tut and say how disgusting it was, asking ourselves what the world was coming to and so on. I would be thinking about the people being held against their will, nothing else, thinking about their families. I swear to God, I would not give a damn if the man who was doing such things lost his life. I would be happy for the police to do whatever was necessary.’
Helen pointed to Akhtar, then to herself. ‘This… is not you,’ she said.
He asked her if she would like to watch the television for a while, but she said no. Much as she would have appreciated the chance to get lost for a while in something nice and mindless, she thought it was important to keep talking. At least until she was sure things were back on an even keel.
As even as it was ever likely to get, at least.
‘You know, even on that first night when Amin came home, I did not get upset straight away,’ Akhtar said. ‘Nadira went to pieces as you would expect, the sight of all that blood, but I kept it all inside for a while, same as always. Even when I knew what had happened, when I discovered that this other boy was dead, I just thought about it. I was trying to understand, trying to work out what needed to be done and it was like all the emotions I should have been feeling were just laid to one side for later on.’
‘People do that,’ Helen said.
‘When he was killed, I did not even cry like a father should cry for his son.’ He shook his head. His voice had dropped. ‘Can you believe that? I felt ashamed that I was not like my wife, like the rest of the family. Nadira wept enough for all of us of course, rivers of tears, but still… I felt as though I was letting Amin down or something. Like I did not love him as much as I thought.’
‘Someone has to be strong.’
‘I did not feel strong, Miss Weeks,’ he said. ‘I just felt… inhuman.’ He glanced at the gun and sighed, he looked exhausted suddenly. ‘What’s happening now, all these feelings like bolts of lightning, this blackness… I think maybe I am paying the price for what I was like back then. You are paying the price too, and Mr Mitchell.’
He stood up and walked to the toilet, and for a few minutes Helen was forced to listen to him voiding his bowels, shitting like it was water. When he emerged, Helen bit back her disgust and told him that she needed to go too. He took the key to the handcuffs from the tabletop and stepped towards her.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘When Paul was killed.’
Helen wished she had said yes to the television. ‘I was like you,’ she said, eventually. ‘I didn’t cry straight away. I wanted to, I felt like I should be crying, but it just… didn’t happen. I made myself busy. I ran around like an idiot. I was trying to find out why Paul had died.’
‘Yes, you said. This was when you met Mr Thorne.’
She nodded. ‘And I had the baby to worry about. I had Alfie kicking the hell out of me, and I’d spent weeks crying for no good reason anyway because my hormones were all over the place.’
‘You did cry though, eventually?’
‘Eventually.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘What?’
‘Did it feel good, I mean?’
Helen thought about it, tried to remember. ‘Like finally eating something when you’ve been starving. But it tastes foul. Sour.’
‘Because I still haven’t cried for Amin,’ Akhtar said. ‘Not for the right reasons, anyway. Not because I’ve lost a son.’ He leaned towards her and offered the key. ‘There will be plenty of time for that though. In prison, if that is the way this ends.’
Helen said, ‘Yes,’ and took the key, the ‘if’ ringing in her head.
‘Everything is finished one way or another,’ Akhtar said. ‘After what I did to Mr Mitchell.’
‘I’ll tell them what happened.’
He shrugged as though it did not matter. As though he had already resigned himself to life in prison, or worse. ‘I will cry for Amin before this ends,’ he said. ‘I’ll cry for him when I know why.’