Storm Crow

by Jeff Gulvin

  He paused for a moment, looked again towards Old Compton Street, then turned back for the cordon. A rush of air hit him and then the blast and the booming sound that blocked his ears. The sudden force of the pressure wave lifted him off his feet and sent him crashing against a lamppost. Glass flew on the wind, the windows of the buildings exploding in thousands of pieces as they were sucked from their housings. It shattered all around him, bouncing off the pavements and the parked cars, littering his head, chest and legs.

  When it was over, he sat on his backside with the wind knocked out of him, hundreds of little rips in the cloth of his vest. He studied his arms, shook his head and let go a breath. There was not a mark on him. The police officers standing on the other side of the cordon could see him. They shouted. He waved and sat there for a moment longer, before getting to his feet and checking again for cuts. George Webb came over to him, already suited in a nylon coverall with overboots and sterile rubber gloves. ‘You OK, Phil?’

  ‘What was that battle cry again?’ Cregan glanced at his watch. ‘Shit, I’m not even on overtime.’

  Jack Swann was in the squad room on the fifteenth floor of the Yard when the blast ripped through Soho. He looked up from his desk as Superintendent Colson came in.

  ‘It’s gone,’ Swann said.

  Colson lifted his eyebrows. ‘It certainly sounds like it, Jack.’

  Swann got up and went over to the window. He could see Parliament from here and beyond it, the City. Down the corridor, the bomb-data team and exhibits officers who would aid George Webb were making their way to the lift.

  The door to the squad room was open and John Garrod came in. Garrod had just assumed overall command of the security group as deputy assistant commissioner, giving him direct responsibility over. SO13, the Antiterrorist Branch, and SO12, Special Branch. The move was a good one and had been welcomed by the troops. Although the day-to-day running of the Branch was handled by DSU Colson as operational commander, Garrod carried overall responsibility; and unlike his predecessors he had argued against close protection officers being assigned to him. His house was guarded but he did not carry a sidearm.

  Swann had literally bumped into Colson just over a year ago. His first day had been when the IRA ceasefire ended abruptly with the massive lorry bomb at South Quay. He had gone up to the fifteenth floor as soon as the coded warning came in. Swann and Webb met him as they walked out of the lift, on their way to Canary Wharf. Welcome to the Branch, sir, they told him. Later, they had talked him through what had happened. An explosion, Webb had explained, was a solid becoming a gas instantaneously. It comprised three elements: heat, blast and fragmentation. Various videos later, he understood what they meant.

  Colson folded his arms and looked at Garrod. ‘We never received a codeword, John.’

  ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘Very,’ Swann put in. ‘They’ve not done that since the first Harrods bang.’

  Garrod looked at him then. ‘We’ll have to see what develops. Who’s crime-scene manager over there?’

  ‘George Webb, sir.’

  Garrod nodded and turned to Colson again. ‘Let me know when you get the video from the explosives officer, Bill. I’d like to have a look.’

  The dark-skinned man with close-cut hair and black eyes watched the early morning television news in a large house in West London. He sat with one leg draped over the arm of the chair and the remote-control set in his hand. On the small table next to him was a book on the life of Geronimo.

  Slowly, he crunched his way through a Granny Smith apple. The newscaster was detailing the bomb scene in Soho. It was literally within the last hour and the TV crews had not yet been allowed access. The details were scant, but the man sat and listened and bit into his apple, tasting the juice as it squirted over his tongue. When the broadcast was over, he got up and switched off the set. At the window, he leaned with his forehead against the glass and watched the dustbin men taking away the rubbish.

  He could see the man who owned the garage at the end of the street, where black taxis were repaired. He was in his blue overalls as usual, a roll-up cigarette stuck to his lip as he sat in the car and fiddled with the doorlock. The dark-skinned man moved back from the window and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Then he went into the hall, collected his coat and bag from the banister and left the house. He stopped at a phone booth on the Broadway, dialled a mobile number and waited. After a few rings, the phone was answered by a woman.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘You’ve seen the news.’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘Pass it on.’

  He put the phone down, then turned and walked into the tube station. He rode into the West End and got out at Piccadilly Circus, crossed beyond the statue of Eros and paused at the foot of Shaftesbury Avenue. Halfway along, it was cordoned off by police tape. He could see that some of the buildings up by Romilly Street had shards of glass hanging from where their windows had been. He took a camera and press ID from the bag, hung the ID about his neck on its chain and then walked up to the police officer guarding the cordon.

  ‘When’re we allowed in?’ He indicated the press pass.

  ‘Not been called yet. Be about twenty minutes. Soon as the buildings have been inspected for safety.’ The officer turned then and pointed up the street. ‘You need to go to the cordon on Brewer Street. It’s where they’re all assembling.’

  George Webb was in control of the chaos now, bomb-scene management his speciality. He and Phil Cregan had taken a look at the seat of the explosion, now a sizeable hole in the ground, beside the ruined shell of the American Diner. The car was unrecognizable. Bits of it would be everywhere. There had to have been a second TPU. The video from the Wheelbarrow showed the complete disintegration of the one under the seat, so there had to have been another, possibly on the floor between the front and back seats, or maybe covered by the travelling rug on the back seat itself. Disturbing thoughts were already occurring to him. Why have two TPUs? The first was obviously a decoy. There had been no coded warning, yet the TPU on the pictures looked exactly like the box used to house a PIRA Mk 15. PIRA had not blown anything up without a warning since the first Harrods bomb. Whoever planted the bomb knew that they would do a controlled explosion on the TPU and render the device safe. That had been accomplished; and if Phil Cregan had not had second thoughts about bomb suits, there would have been at least one casualty.

  Cregan was looking at the bent frame of the Alvis Wheelbarrow. The platform chassis was intact, as, amazingly, was the stance gearbox. The upper hamper, complete with teleboom and weapons mounting system, had been ripped off by the force of the blast.

  Webb had swept an approach path to the scene up Old Compton Street and was busy zoning the area for evidence. He had ordered six brand-new lorry skips and the sterile equipment had arrived from the Yard. He wondered how many tarpaulins they would need to package the car for the Defence Research Agency in Kent. Control swabs for explosive contamination were being taken while the make-safe checks on the buildings were going on. Give it five more minutes and the press would be allowed in.

  The dark-skinned man gathered with his ‘colleagues’ behind the cordon tape and waited patiently until they were called. The word came that the area was deemed safe enough for photographs and they moved forward along the approach path, all of them wearing yellow hard hats. The dark-skinned man could see that window fragmentation damage had reached as far as the 150-metre mark along the cordon path. After that, there was significant structural damage. He could see impact and pressure marks on the walls of restaurants and strip clubs along the route. The gay bar, in particular, was shattered. They came to the main area of impact, which was directly around the site where the car had been parked. Here the buildings were very badly damaged. The Diner was all but gone, as was the video shop and adult entertainment centre alongside it. The Prince Edward Theatre had lost all its windows and suffered serious impact and pressure damage. It would not be showing
Martin Guerre for a while: the sign advertising the musical dangled at a pitiful angle.

  He took photographs and listened to the short account of the damage given to them by the unnamed man in the blue coverall suit. He was stocky with a moustache and blue eyes and the dark-skinned man would remember him.

  Webb allowed the press to take their pictures and confirmed for them that it was a car bomb with a substantial amount of high explosive. He said nothing about the lack of an accredited warning or the fact that there had clearly been two timing and power units, one of which was a dummy. When they were all done, he got the uniformed local officers to escort them back to the cordons, and returned to the job in hand.

  He zoned the areas for evidence, zone one being the seat of the blast, the area immediately surrounding the remnants of the car and the crater left in the road. The other areas were the streets leading off the intersection. They swept and sifted and sought the wreckage of the car. The minutiae of detail, the maximalist approach to forensic evidence gathering. Everyone knew that assuming they caught the bomber they would have to prove the explosion and link him to it. Control swabs for cross-contamination were vital. That was always the main thrust of the defence lawyers, that and whether the exhibits team had done their jobs properly. The defence would have access to the press photographs and video footage, which was largely why they were no longer allowed to film the antiterrorist officers working. Webb organized it all. The large bits of car were located and brought back to zone one and the seat of the explosion, where they were prepared in sterile packaging and freighted to Kent on the low-loader.

  Every building within the cordon area was checked and, slowly, parts of the car were recovered. The mangled bonnet, along with part of the windscreen struts, was retrieved from the roof of the pub halfway along Old Compton Street. Webb wanted the engine, intact hopefully, with the engine number accessible so they could begin to trace it.

  He started work on the ruined American Diner, easing himself inside, squeezing past the melted metal chairs still half fixed to the floor. The floor itself was broken up and uneven, and the metal counter had buckled into itself and most of it was pushed up against the back wall, which was now half inside the kitchen. Thank God they had got everyone out.

  He wanted some part of the timing mechanism. The others could concentrate on the bigger items and were already piling everything into the skips, leaving aside glass and stone. Wood they kept for impact marks. Webb knew from many years of experience that the spring on the timing mechanism would be intact. It had still to be found, but it would be intact. It was made of high tensile steel and light, so it was not generally thrown that far away. The seat of the explosion had been on the north side of the Diner, so the immediate vicinity of that stretch of Old Compton Street was prime. If he found the spring from the Memopark, he could probably match it with exhibits taken at other scenes. He moved aside a fallen chair inside the Diner and made out what he thought must once have been the till, smashed in pieces with all its innards ripped open. Then he saw a small dog, scruffy-looking thing, the sort you see with beggars on the Underground. It was tugging at something under the fallen counter.

  Webb moved over to the dog. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ he said. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ The dog looked up at him, ducked to pick something up, and Webb made a grab for its scruff. The dog yelped and slipped his grip, then made off, leaving behind whatever it had been after. Webb shone his torch into the recesses of the hole under the counter and saw what looked like a severed foot. He stood up, scratched his head and looked again. It had been a foot, shoe and sock burned off by the blast along with most of the skin. What he could see was a reddened lump of meat with part of the ankle bone sticking out at the top.

  Outside, he phoned the Yard and asked to speak to Superintendent Colson.

  ‘Colson here, George. How’s it going?’

  ‘Fatality, sir.’

  For a moment Colson was quiet. ‘I thought West End. Central told us they got everyone out.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘What have you found exactly, George?’

  ‘A foot.’ Webb looked at the distance between the seat of the blast and the counter in the Diner. Fifteen feet at best. ‘I’m not going to get much else. A few bits and pieces maybe, jawbone, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Do we know if anyone’s unaccounted for?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘OK, George. We’ll check the evacuees.’

  Swann phoned Pia at her flat when he knew she would be up, to tell her that he wasn’t going to make it. He had been on nights and often went to her flat before she left for work in the morning. ‘Hi, darling. It’s me.’

  ‘Jack. Are you coming over? I don’t have a meeting till eleven.’

  Swann blew out his cheeks, sorely tempted. Already, the fatigue dripped in his eyes and he imagined the warmth of Pia’s naked flesh against his own.

  ‘I can’t, love. A bomb’s gone off in Soho.’

  ‘Oh God. Was anybody hurt?’

  ‘Not sure yet. You haven’t seen the news?’

  ‘I’ve only just got up.’ She sighed then. ‘Bed’s warm, Jack. Can’t you spare half an hour?’

  Swann groaned. ‘Oh, don’t.’ He shook his head. ‘No. I really can’t. I’m up to my neck here.’

  ‘All right. I want to see you later though, before I go away. We haven’t talked for ages.’

  ‘OK, love. Don’t worry. We’ll sort something out.’

  Swann hung up. The description of the car was an old Mark II Cortina. The E suffix in the index number matched correctly with the possible year of manufacture, but the number plate was from a Hillman Imp. The second vehicle was a Vauxhall Vectra and he had the last three letters of its number: RAH, it had stuck in the night manager’s mind. Swann discovered that the RAH suffix was used to register vehicles in parts of East Anglia. He checked with the manufacturers and got confirmation that they first introduced the model in October 1995. The prefix letter must either be an N or a P.

  They had already dubbed the operation Ding Dong after the ringed car, and Colson had requested the video tapes from traffic cameras in and around the area, together with those from any shop which ran street-surveillance tapes all night. They needed to try to ascertain the exact route the car had taken before being parked and the explosive device primed.

  Swann phoned the Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea. Colson walked into the squad room as he was finishing the call. ‘How’re you getting on with the car, Jack?’

  ‘RAH is a Lowestoft/Norwich suffix,’ Swann told him. ‘The car can only be an N or a P, so I’ve asked for a list of registered cars, from Swansea. Should be over here tomorrow.’

  Colson nodded. ‘Webb’s just been on the line from the crime scene. It appears there was a fatality after all.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. We’re getting West End Central to do a check, find out who was missing.’

  Swann sat down. ‘Where did he find the body?’

  ‘It’s only a foot so far. Apparently, a dog was chewing it inside the Diner, so it’s likely to be one of the employees. Either that, or a customer who didn’t come out when he should have.’

  Swann nodded. ‘Any other witnesses come forward yet?’

  ‘No. The commander’s giving a press conference in an hour. He’ll make an appeal for calls on the 0800 number. Hopefully, we’ll get something from the public. I’m going over to the scene now with DI Clements if you want to come along.’

  The three of them went to Soho in Clements’ car. ‘Why would PIRA suddenly stop using coded warnings?’ Colson said to no one in particular.

  ‘What about the intended target?’ Swann leaned between the two front seats. ‘What’s there to hit in Soho at four in the morning, except a bunch of knackered old farts in long raincoats?’

  Clements squinted at him in the mirror. ‘That’s what I’ve been wondering.’

  Swann s
at back again. ‘We don’t know it was PIRA, do we?’

  ‘It was their Mk 15,’ Colson said. ‘The election’s coming up; who knows what they’re up to.’

  They pulled up in Windmill Street and got out of the car. Swann could see Webb placing evidence in nylon bags. He had his head down and did not see them approach.

  ‘Hey, Webby,’ Swann called.

  ‘One minute.’

  Swann looked at the evidence bags: a few of them were red and sweating. He sifted through them and found the foot that the dog had inadvertently alerted them to.

  ‘Got half a jawbone as well,’ Webb said, looking up for the first time. ‘Might get an ID from that.’ He picked up another bag. ‘Also recovered this.’

  Clements looked closely at it.

  ‘Spring from the Memopark,’ Webb told him.

  Swann took the bag from him and stared at the bent piece of metal. Webb looked at Colson. ‘Definitely PIRA, sir. No question about that. My guess is there were two of them. The one that Phil Cregan disrupted was a decoy—not attached to anything.’

  ‘Cunning. Cunning and very nasty.’

  ‘Could’ve been. Phil was on his way in when it went up.’

  Colson nodded. ‘He wasn’t hurt though, was he?’