Under a March sky slashed with evening red, the three shire horses grazed peacefully, deaf to the din in the neighbouring field. A police cordon hinted at the cause of the commotion. The day before, the remains of a chopped-up body had been found by passersby. When I heard the news, I whispered a prayer: “Please don’t let it be Amin.”
I wanted to call him, just to put my mind at ease, but I stopped myself. I didn’t want to open that door again.
The murder scene, on the fringes of Croydon, wasn’t far from a boxing club I’d taken Amin to a few years earlier. The reception had been immediately hostile. As soon as we walked in, he locked eyes with an Irish Traveller kid in the ring. They knew each other. Things had escalated after they clashed on Snapchat, and the kid had sent out a KOS — Kill on Sight — call to his friends. It meant Amin was marked as soon as he set foot in the area, which he still did fairly often to visit an uncle. “It’s worth the risk,” he once told me.
But was it?
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