Deadly Terror (Detective Zoe Finch Book 4)

by Rachel McLean

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sunday

  Zoe lay in bed, scrolling through her phone. She knew she should go downstairs, but that meant facing her mum.

  There was a voicemail from Carl, checking up on her. She wasn’t used to accounting for herself. It was nice having people who worried about her, but it could be a chore.

  She dialled his number. “Sorry, Carl. I hope you got my text last night.”

  “I got it. Did you get my message?”

  “Sorry, only just picked it up. You know what the networks are like when this kind of thing happens.”

  “Were you at New Street?”

  “I went to the airport. With Detective Superintendent Randle and DS Osman.”

  Carl whistled. “My two favourite people.”

  “Yeah. Ian was supposed to be on his day off. He told me he’d had a call from the office, made his way straight there from a shopping trip. I’m not so sure.”

  “You think it’s suspicious?” Carl asked.

  DI Carl Whaley was Zoe’s boyfriend, but he was also an officer in the Professional Standards division. He’d planted Ian in Zoe’s team to have him watch Randle. Ian had struck a deal with him, and now Zoe was stuck with the man.

  “It’s just odd, that’s all,” she said. “He doesn’t have a role in the incident command structure, and he was there before me. And I got a lift with Randle in his Audi.”

  “Maybe Randle told him.”

  “I was with Randle the whole way there. And besides, the two of them aren’t exactly mates.”

  “We don’t know that,” Carl said.

  “You haven’t found any evidence that they’ve worked together. Surely that’s why you’re happy for Ian to spy on Randle.”

  “We have to be open to all options, Zoe. Let me know if anything else happens. Anything odd.”

  “Will do. Has Ian been reporting to you?”

  “Nothing of interest yet. My Super is starting to put the pressure on.”

  “Surely Ian knows that if he doesn’t give you anything soon, he’ll lose his deal?”

  “I never explicitly said that. But yeah. I’m not sure what happens to Ian if he doesn’t keep up his side of the bargain, but it won’t be good. He knows that.”

  “Poor Alison.”

  “A bent copper is a bent copper, no matter what his family situation.”

  “She’s been through a lot.”

  “Zoe, let’s not discuss the ins and outs of my job, huh? I just wanted to check you’re OK.”

  “I’m fine.” Carl was bristly this morning. Had she pissed him off by not returning his call?

  “So you’ll be on the investigation team for New Street, then?” he asked.

  “And the airport. We need to establish if the two were linked. Adi Hanson’s working on it, with some woman from the fire service he seems to be sweet on.”

  Call laughed. “I thought he was sweet on you.”

  “He’s just a mate.”

  There was a knock at her door. “Gotta go, Carl. I’ll come round to yours tonight, after I finish.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  “It could be late.”

  “I know. Wake me if it is.”

  She smiled. “I will.”

  Another knock.

  “Wait a minute!” she snapped.

  “Sorry. I’ll go,” said Carl.

  “It’s just Nicholas. He got a scare last night, thought it was me who’d got injured.”

  “How is Lesley?”

  “That’ll be my next call.”

  The door opened and Zoe hung up. Nicholas rarely disturbed her in the morning, especially on Sundays.

  “Zoe.”

  She slumped back against the pillows. “Mum.”

  “Did I disturb you?”

  “It’s fine. I need to get to work.”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “I don’t exactly have a nine-to-five job, Mum.”

  Annette gave her a sheepish smile. “I know, love.”

  Zoe grimaced. She hated it when her mum tried to be affectionate. She’d spent most of Zoe’s childhood ignoring her, too engrossed in the bottom of a bottle. Now when she wanted attention herself, Zoe wasn’t inclined to give it.

  She threw the duvet aside. “Nicholas told me you were in town when it happened.”

  Annette’s eyes widened. “It was terrifying.”

  “Were you in the station?”

  “No. I was… I was further along New Street.”

  Zoe tried to remember the pubs along there. Annette would have been in the Briar Rose, one of her usual haunts.

  “You rang him, and he came to pick you up.”

  “He came in a cab. You’ve raised a fine boy there, Zoe.”

  Zoe threw a shirt over the t-shirt she’d been wearing in bed. No thanks to your example, she thought.

  “How long are you staying?” she asked as she fastened the buttons.

  Annette clung to the doorframe. “A couple of days.”

  “Surely you need to be at home.”

  “I’m scared, Zo.”

  Zoe gave her a look. Only Mo got to call her that.

  “Zoe. Sweetheart.”

  Zoe ground her teeth.

  “Two terror attacks in one day,” Annette continued. “When you get to my age, your nerves…”

  Zoe snorted. Annette’s nerves were nothing to do with her age.

  “OK,” she conceded. “You can stay till Tuesday.”

  Annette’s face broke into a smile. “Thank you.” She reached her arms out. Zoe frowned and shook her head. Annette let her arms drop to her side.

  “Just don’t eat all the food.” Zoe pulled on her jeans. “And don’t bring any booze into the house, alright? I don’t want you giving it to Nicholas.”

  “He’s eighteen, love. It’s perfectly legal.”

  “Drinking with his alcoholic grandmother isn’t how I want my son spending his time when he’s got A levels to prepare for.”

  “Oh, go easy on him, love. He’ll be at university soon, able to do his own thing.”

  Zoe took a step towards her mum. “I said you can stay here. But leave Nicholas alone, alright? He doesn’t need you messing things up for him.”

  “I won’t mess things up for—”

  Zoe yanked the door open. “I’ve got work. Just keep out of trouble and I’ll see you later.”

  She slumped. She couldn’t go to Carl’s for the night now. And there was no way she was bringing him here with her mum staying over. “I’ll get a takeaway.”

  “A curry would be lovely.”

  “Hmm.”

  Zoe hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen. Nicholas was buttering toast.

  “Mum.”

  She gave him a peck on the cheek. He winced and rubbed the spot where she’d kissed him. She opened the fridge: four cans of lager. “I’m getting rid of these, alright?”

  “They’re mine, Mum.”

  “I don’t want your gran drinking them.”

  Annette was in the doorway. Her dressing gown hung off her and she was pale. Her cheekbones were sharp and her limbs stick-thin. Zoe gave her a look of disgust.

  “I’m taking them,” she said, as much for Annette’s benefit as for Nicholas’s.

  “Fair enough,” Nicholas said. “I’ll go to the pub with Zaf.”

  “You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  “I won’t stay out late. You said you were going to stop doing this.”

  She clenched her fists. He was right. She’d been overprotective of him when she’d been working her last big case, a killer targeting gay men. She’d agreed to cut him some slack. But having Annette here threw her off balance.

  “Sorry, love. You go to the pub if you want.”

  He grinned. “Cool. I’m going back to bed.”

  Zoe checked the clock: seven thirty. She’d be late for the eight o’clock briefing.

  She brushed past Annette and made for the front door. Yoda stirred from
her spot on the stairs and miaowed at her.

  “Can you feed Yoda?” she called as she opened the front door.

  “I’ll do it.” Annette was in the doorway to the living room. She picked the cat up. Zoe shuddered. It’s alright, she told herself. You can trust her with a cat.

  She gave her mum a final look and yanked the door open, hoping she could calm herself down on the drive into work.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rhodri and Ian were in the team room when Zoe arrived. She slung her coat on the back of her chair in the inner office and re-emerged with a notebook.

  “I’m late for the briefing,” she said. “Why aren’t you in it already?”

  “We were waiting for you, boss,” Rhodri said. “How’s the DCI?”

  She stopped in her tracks. “Not good. She got glass lodged in her brain stem. Five hours in surgery. But she’s recovering now. We’ll know more later.”

  Rhodri gave her a nervous smile.

  “Come on then,” said Ian. “Don’t want Randle picking us out for public ridicule.”

  Zoe gave him a look. “Hmmm.”

  She pushed the door open and they sped along the corridors. “Is Connie already there?” she asked.

  “No sign of her yet,” said Ian.

  Zoe skidded to a halt. “She’s not in?”

  Ian shook his head. “Not unless she went straight there.”

  Connie wouldn’t have even known there was a briefing until she spoke to Ian. But she would have seen the news, would know to be in early.

  “Knowing Con, she’s already in there,” said Rhodri. “Keen as mustard, like.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Zoe paused then opened the door to the briefing room.

  It was already full. A dozen heads turned to her and she smiled, trying to hide the awkwardness. Damn.

  “Morning,” she said, trying to make it sound as if she should be late, not that she’d been dealing with her alcoholic mother and had to rush into work.

  “DI Finch, glad you could grace us with your presence.” Randle was at the front, sitting with a man she didn’t recognise.

  “Sir.”

  Zoe scanned the room: no sign of Connie. She turned to Rhodri who shrugged then took a chair. She shuffled past him, wishing he’d thought to sit further along, and sat next to DI Dawson. He gave her a wry smile which she chose to ignore.

  Randle was fiddling with a laptop, barking at a woman in a pale blue dress to get the damn projector working. So they hadn’t missed much. Randle liked his Powerpoint presentations. Zoe preferred a board, as did Lesley.

  The room felt empty without the DCI. She’d be sitting at the front, eating one of her yoghurts and not taking any bullshit from Randle.

  She’d be back soon. Hopefully.

  At last the projector decided to behave and Randle’s carefully formulated slides appeared on the screen behind him. Zoe wondered how late his secretary had stayed up preparing them.

  “Right,” he said. “Before we start, introductions.” He gestured towards the man next to him. “Detective Superintendent Silton is head of the anti-terror division. His team will be analysing existing intelligence and identifying what fits with this incident. I expect Force CID teams to work closely with his officers, to share information.”

  Zoe raised a hand.

  “We haven’t got to questions yet, DI Finch,” Randle said.

  “You’re referring to one incident, sir,” she replied. “Not two.”

  “We believe this is one co-ordinated attack. The same people responsible in both cases.”

  “Do we have intelligence that confirms that?”

  Randle narrowed his eyes at her. “Not yet, Zoe. But we will do. Don’t you worry about it.”

  She wasn’t worried, not in the way he thought. She eyed Ian, who was focused on the Super, his face steady.

  “So,” Randle said, “if I can be permitted to continue?” He stared at Zoe, his lips twisted in irritation.

  “Sir,” she said. Beside her, Dawson suppressed a smile. She dug her fingernail into her palm.

  “OK.” Randle pointed at the screen, which had moved on to photographs of New Street Station and the airport. The slides advanced, more and more images of destruction flashing up in front of them. The interior of the shopping centre above the station was devastated. The wide walkway over the concourse gaped open, wiring and pipework hanging out and spilling to the floor below. Shop fronts had blown out and their contents littered the ground: charred scraps of clothing, smashed crockery. The row of shops next to the spot where the bomber had stood looked like something from a war zone. Their interiors were blackened and ruined, signs torn down from their positions, each store a gaping void of darkness.

  At the airport, the carnage was confined to one plane, but the human cost had been higher. The room plunged into silence as Randle flicked through photos of bodies laid out on the tarmac and in a hangar, where they had been transferred. The jagged hole in the bottom of the plane seemed larger in daylight than it had in the dark. Zoe felt her stomach hollow out as she gazed at the images.

  So much destruction. So much death.

  “No one has claimed it yet,” said Detective Superintendent Silton. “And if they haven’t yet, they’re unlikely to. Which means one of two things: it’s a new group, or it’s an individual or small group of individuals who want to remain anonymous.”

  “The groups you’re aware of, would they all have gone public?” DI Dawson asked.

  Silton nodded. “There are three groups we’ve been watching in the city and surrounding areas. All of them are associated with other groups abroad who behave in fairly predictable ways. If any of them were responsible, we would expect them to tell the world.”

  “We’re still keeping a close eye on social media and Islamic news outlets,” said a woman Zoe didn’t recognise in the next row forward. “And YouTube. They like YouTube.”

  Randle advanced the slides, and the photos were replaced by a structure chart.

  “This is how we’ll be organising the investigation,” he said. “Anti-terror will be collating existing intelligence, following up sources, linking it to any evidence we’re able to collect. Force CID will be working with the FSIs and pathology team to glean what we can about the attacks. This is no different from a normal investigation, people. We examine the scene, we follow up leads. It may be bigger, and the eyes of the world may be on us, but we do our jobs.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Dawson. Randle gave him a tight nod.

  “How will Force CID teams be allocated?” Zoe asked. She was determined not to let Dawson eclipse her on this one. He’d been a DI five years longer than she had, and he’d been her boss. But she was his equal now.

  “Good question, Zoe.” Randle flicked to the next slide, a CCTV still from the station. It showed two women facing each other, standing a couple of metres apart. One, her back to the camera, wore a green headscarf. The other carried shopping bags and was staring into the first woman’s face.

  Randle pointed at the woman carrying the bags. “Sameena Khan, out shopping with her daughter. She tried to engage the bomber, but got away before the bomb went off, fortunately. Uniform spoke to her briefly, but she was in too much of a state. We’ll need to go back to her.”

  He shifted his pointer to the woman in the headscarf. “This is our bomber. We find out who she is and who she associated with. She might have been forced into this, or she might have been a willing sacrifice. She might have masterminded the whole thing, or been a nobody. We need to know which.”

  Randle fixed his gaze on Zoe. “Your team’s job is to find this woman. Identify her, if you can. Find out if she’s got a record, if she’s involved with any of the groups that Detective Superintendent Silton’s lot are investigating.”

  Zoe looked at Silton. “Could she be one of your targets?”

  “No one we’ve been following closely. They’re all men. But she could be an associate of one of them. Or a girlfriend.”

>   “Presumably the blast did her significant damage?”

  “She’s at City Hospital, in the morgue,” said Randle. “Or at least, the parts of her we were able to recover are.”

  Zoe wrinkled her nose. Beside her Rhodri made a high-pitched sound. It’s alright, she thought. I won’t be sending you there. This was her responsibility.

  “Sir,” she said.

  “Good.” He flicked to the next slide. Zoe bit her lip.

  “There was one other casualty,” Randle said.

  The image showed a woman in a blue suit and white shirt. She lay twisted on the floor of the shopping centre. Her body was covered in cuts, her suit shredded on one side. Blood pooled around her body.

  Randle cleared his throat. “Inspector Ashanti Jameson, chief negotiator. Killed in the line of duty.”

  The room fell into silence. Zoe felt her throat constrict.

  Randle sniffed. “It was a nail bomb. Comparatively speaking, it didn’t cause as much damage as it might have done. But this officer…”

  Rhodri pulled in a shaky breath, his fists clenched on his knees. The door at the back of the room opened and Zoe heard an exclamation.

  She turned to see Connie standing against the wall, her hand clutched to her chest. Where have you been? she thought.

  Randle glanced at Connie and then at Zoe. She met his gaze, willing him to move onto the next slide.

  After a few excruciating moments in which Rhodri tried to mutter into Zoe’s ear and she did her best to ignore him, Randle turned back to the screen. The next slide showed the airport hangar, bodies lined up in rows. “Frank, I want your team on the airport.”

  “Wait,” said Zoe.

  Randle raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

  “I was there last night. With DS Osman. With the forensics team and the pathologist. I’ve got a head start. Wouldn’t it make sense for my team to focus on the airport, and DI Dawson to take the station?”

  Randle leaned back in his chair, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. When he righted himself, he was staring at Zoe. “Nothing changes with you, does it DI Finch?”