‘Right, Ted, I should see the kids. It’s been almost two months since we had a proper full day out together. Fucking job. It’s all right for you – you’ve got the girl from the sari shop downstairs on your side. They’ve only got their mum. As amazing as she is, I think their dad needs to try and see them a bit more often too.’
Ted looked up from her food as he spoke, her green eyes locked on his as if she understood him. The sunlight made her coat gleam.
Jake’s grandmother was not used to living alongside people of a different skin colour. Some might even have described her as a bit on the discriminatory side. Jake thought her whole generation were in many ways. By today’s politically correct standards, she could have been termed a racist. Jake remembered her talking about the sari-shop owners downstairs. ‘My neighbours are Indian, you know, but they are really very nice.’
Jake smirked at the backhanded compliment. She had been right in a way. About the daughter, at the very least – she really was very nice.
He walked to the bedroom to find his phone.
73
Saturday
20 August 2005
1523 hours
East Dulwich, Southwark, south London
The girls were playing on the slide at the local park, a short walk from their home, though they hadn’t walked. They had pulled on their roller skates to race down there like their lives depended upon it, the excitement unbearable. There had been a frenzy of activity to find their skates in the cupboard under the stairs, a frantic lacing up of their boots and then a bundle of bodies, arms and legs to get out of the front door, and see who could be first onto the driveway outside.
Tayte was the oldest at seven. She had Jake’s eyes and similar colouring. The rest of her was her mother – tall, elegant, long hair, and both confident and sharp with her tongue. Megan was five. She was tiny in comparison. Nothing came easy to her but, like Jake, she was a fighter and determined to win at everything she did. She was more of a tomboy, liked her hair short and was comfiest in jeans and trainers. ‘I don’t want girls’ clothes,’ seemed to be her favourite saying. She was much more like Jake in her temperament too. She had her own way of doing things.
Jake sat at a battered, wooden picnic table next to some red, fixed play equipment. Bees buzzed among the dandelion clocks as the tallest conifer trees cast shadows. The shadows pointed at the playground in the middle of the park, like dark arrows on the lush grass showing where the fun was to be had. Days like this were what Jake remembered his life had been like before. Before the bombings. Before he’d joined the Branch. Before his mother and grandmother had died. Before the split – and before he’d started drinking too much.
The girls had been really pleased to see their dad when he’d arrived at the house, the place that had been his own home too until he’d walked out. Stephanie had actually smiled at him when he’d arrived to pick them up. He had keys to the house but no longer used them. Jake wondered if the guilt he felt would ever leave.
Stephanie and Jake spoke very little – just like it was when they were married really. Friends, good friends, partners, but no longer lovers. They had been, once upon a time, before the kids. They’d had a good sex life but it had disappeared once the first baby had turned into two. Jake didn’t really know why. He’d become consumed by his job, as Stephanie had with her own career and the children’s increasingly busy lives. They’d just grown apart, as the cliché ran.
When the girls were around, or the family kept dropping in, there never seemed to be any time to talk. There was no chance to have grown-up nights out, nor a window to enjoy intimacy any longer. All he’d wanted was to be close to someone. He didn’t really understand why he’d not tried harder to work it through with her.
Maybe it was a failing within him, an inability to stick at it. He wondered if it was just his own psychological issues rather than a problem between them both. That’s why he had walked out, he reasoned. He’d needed to work through in his own head what was going on.
After his mother and grandmother had died, he’d pushed all the emotions to the back of his mind and filed them in the ‘I’ll-deal-with-those-later’ box.
He’d immersed himself in his work. He wasn’t hiding from the box of emotions, or so he kept telling himself – there just wasn’t time right now… He’d deal with it later.
The box was left abandoned, still unopened.
‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy – watch this!’ Megan shouted as she slid face-first down the slide, launching herself off the end, like Superman freeze-framed in the air for a nanosecond, before landing with her chest on the tarmac at the bottom. She laughed and got up.
‘You, you, you! Your go now!’ She pointed to Tayte at the top of the slide.
Tayte looked down at her nice new blouse and favourite checked skirt, and shook her head.
‘Chicken!’ Megan stomped off and headed back toward the stairs for the slide.
The girls were growing up fast.
What had that space given him? Space to miss them growing up? Not to be a proper dad? Space to drink more? More time to work? His head was no clearer. He missed the girls. He missed Stephanie in many ways. Yes at first he’d had lots of sex – mainly with strangers whom he never saw again. Yes the sex was sometimes good, dirty sex. But the cost? He’d traded all this for some cheap thrills and now a girlfriend he never saw? Was that it? Is that what he’d done? Maybe if he opened the box and dealt with the grief of losing his mother and grandmother, maybe that was the key to it all? There was no time now. It would have to wait.
‘Come on, girls. Skates on. Time to go home!’ said Jake, standing up from the table.
74
Monday
22 August 2005
0900 hours
Commercial Road, East End of London
Jake and Lenny were heading east with the windows down on the car. The majority of the early-morning traffic was trundling into the city in the opposite direction. Clear blue skies and no wind; today was going to be a scorcher. The pavements were busy with people dressed for the occasion.
‘You didn’t get drunk over the weekend then, Jake? I’m assuming that’s why you wanted to drive today, unlike most days…’ Lenny smirked across at him in the driver’s seat of the BMW.
‘I spent all weekend going through the phone data. I didn’t sleep much. That data is an absolute gold mine. I did have a few jars on Friday night though.’
‘After the post-mortem? You managed to keep it down without being sick, I’m amazed! So you hooked up with your bit of skirt on Friday, did you?’ asked Lenny.
‘Nah, bumped into someone in the pub, an old mate. We got chatting about religion. He knows his way around the Quran. Interesting bloke.’
‘A devout Muslim in the pub, Jake? Pull over, you’re fucking drunk and high on drugs, mate!’
Jake laughed.
‘He’s non-practising. Father was very strict, force-fed him Islam as a kid – so much so that he can recite it verse by verse. Likes a beer now though. More my type of bloke. He’s all right.’
‘Who is this guy? I’ve never heard you talk about him before.’
‘Just an old pal. I’ve known him for years. Alex, his name is.’
You never called a snout by their real name to anyone. Only the handler and controller knew their true name and address and the snout would be assigned a pseudonym. Jake preferred unisex names that did not immediately reveal the informant’s gender to outsiders.
He took informant handling seriously. He had to protect identities. It was a dangerous role for all parties, including Jake. You didn’t blab about your informants to anyone, not even your best mates.
Being a police snout could be a lucrative business, as long as you got results. For information that led to a conviction, a police snout might get a lump sum of £2,000.
The Security Service operated an enti
rely different system. They used suitcases full of money to cultivate an informant, before the snout had even provided any information. These people were then paid a monthly retainer – sometimes as much as £2,000 per month, just to sit on the books.
Mobile phones and cars were also provided to sweeten the deal and ensure that the snouts were able to do whatever the Security Services wanted them to do.
Having been used to the results-driven system within the police, Jake found the methods used by the Security Services very odd. He felt that these snouts were just being paid on a monthly basis to remain in terrorism without delivering the goods. They lived off the money like a salary, became bored, and spent more time getting involved in illicit or extremist activity. Jake saw it breed within communities. Friends and relatives also wanted money for doing virtually nothing – or worse, actually used the money to become involved in dodgy activities when previously they wouldn’t have bothered or have had the time or means to do so.
Jake much preferred the results-based system that the police used. The snout only got paid if they behaved responsibly and provided a measurable outcome to the police.
Running snouts was a very messy business, even when both you and your informant played by the rules.
That’s why Zarshad was now just a friend called ‘Alex’; an old friend that Jake had bumped into at the pub over the weekend.
Jake glanced over at Lenny in the passenger seat. ‘I was talking to Alex about the timing of the attacks, about Wasim’s video that’s been showing on the news. The time of the attacks is a big thing. It has a meaning. Something we’ve all missed. Other people knew the significance. I don’t think it’s just the four of them.’
‘We’ve been saying that for weeks, Jake. The MIR is all over the place. What does your lady friend at the Security Service say?’ asked Lenny.
‘The official line is that, on the ground, it’s just the four lads up in Yorkshire involved in 7/7. I think Claire might have some more information, but she or the Security Service is trying to throw us off the scent.’
‘Maybe the Security Service are just a shit organisation, Jake? I think we give them far too much credit. Some play with computers, some go out and play at being James Bond. But, actually, they’re just a bunch of kids who know nothing about the world. Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.’
‘Why the lies about what they do or don’t know then?’
‘Because they can?’ Lenny shrugged.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They can say what they like. They know we can’t look at the intelligence they hold – no one can. Not even the politicians. They’re their own keepers, answerable to no one. That’s the way us police used to be in the seventies. No one could touch us. We did what we liked. If we made a mistake, we covered it up. We didn’t have to put up with the shit from the courts that we do now.
‘They lie because they can, Jake. Because they can get away with it. Of course they know more. Of course they’ve fucked up, but they’re never going to admit it and we’re never going to be able to prove that, are we?’
They were headed into the Blackwall tunnel. The sunshine was suddenly gone, replaced with neon light that flooded from the ceiling. An acrid smell of traffic fumes filled the car. They both wound up their windows.
The tunnel came to an abrupt end and they were dazzled by the daylight. They’d be at Fort Halstead soon.
The drive from the Blackwall tunnel to Sevenoaks took about an hour. They spoke little about work again until they started to climb the hill toward the Fort Halstead facility.
‘What do you reckon they’re going to tell us about the dirty bomb, Jake? D’you think it’s caused an epidemic?’
‘I don’t know. I dread to think. To be honest, Len – I really hope they’ve found nothing at all.’
75
Monday
22 August 2005
1045 hours
Fort Halstead, Sevenoaks, Kent
They drove slowly toward the barriers blocking the entrance to the facility. A security guard in a black jumper and black trousers stepped out of the small building next to the barriers, with a clipboard.
‘If your name’s not on the list, you ain’t coming in,’ quipped Lenny as they slowed down.
Jake stopped the car next to the guard.
‘Who are you here to see, gents?’
‘Professor Bowman. We should be on the list. DI Flannagan and DS Sandringham,’ said Jake through the car’s open window.
The guard scrolled down the clipboard, ‘Yes. You know where you’re going?’
‘Yep, no problem,’ said Jake.
The guard turned and waved back toward the building to give the OK. The metal barrier in front of them slid slowly skyward, leaving an open road. Jake drove carefully into the vast facility.
Situated on a hill overlooking the commuter haven of Sevenoaks, Fort Halstead had all the appearances of an army base without the army. Low-rise, red-brick buildings, neat streets and cut grass.
The place prided itself on being one of the world’s oldest laboratories and the team in white coats continued to regularly test new types of explosives. However a large proportion of their work was the examination of debris or exhibits in criminal investigations, such as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the mainland IRA campaign during the nineties.
Jake drove along a deserted road to a building at the back of the facility. They were met in the car park by Professor Bowman, a wiry man with grey hair and small round glasses.
Jake and Lenny got out of the car. Bowman shook Jake’s hand. It was a firm handshake. Bowman worked away from the public gaze. He met few people outside his team, but was a man of strong character. Jake often wondered what his background was. He reminded Jake of Q from the James Bond films, even in the way he dressed.
‘Good to see you again, Detective Inspector,’ said Bowman.
He led them into one of the buildings. The corridor had offices either side. Busy people in white lab coats were wandering up and down.
They settled in an office that had framed certificates on the wall. There were lots of them in an assortment of frame styles and sizes, both landscape and portrait. The room held a desk, but Bowman plumped for a green sofa instead.
‘Sit,’ Bowman instructed and indicated to two high-backed chairs opposite him.
Jake and Lenny sat down. Lenny took out a notebook.
‘Thanks for taking the time to see us today. It’s really appreciated,’ said Jake.
‘No problem at all. It’s an interesting piece of work. More than happy to have got involved. Malcolm Denswood at the MIR in London sent me the hospital reports and photos of the amputee last week. I’ve been through all the information in some depth.’
‘And? Anything?’ asked Jake, leaning forward in his chair.
Bowman opened a large brown file and peered into it. ‘Hmm, it’s odd. Did the bombers spend any time in Iraq do you know?’ he asked, looking between Jake and Lenny.
‘I don’t know. It’s possible. We know Wasim Khan, the ringleader, made a video which specifically mentions the war in Iraq as being one of the reasons for blowing himself up in London, and we know that he travelled a fair bit in the last five years. He spent some time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Palestine, according to the Security Service reports. They’ve made no specific mention of Iraq. Not that that means anything to be honest. They don’t mention a lot of stuff they know to us. What do you think this has to do with Iraq?’
‘Clostridium perfringens,’ Bowman announced with a smile, as if it should mean something to Jake.
‘What? What the hell is that?’
‘I’ve been in touch with my colleagues at Porton Down, the biological-weapons facility. Clostridium perfringens is a biological agent that can be used with explosive munitions. It’s a very common bac
terium. It can be found in decaying vegetation, the intestinal tract of humans, other vertebrates, insects and soil. It’s also the third most common cause of food poisoning in the UK and the US, thanks to the fact that it has the shortest reported generation time of any organism at just 6.3 minutes. You find it has an absolute ball reproducing at all-day buffets. It loves reheated gravies, lukewarm soups and cooled-down casseroles. If ingested, you may well get diarrhoea, vomiting and fever within the next ten to twelve hours. It doesn’t hang around.
‘However, having said all that, when used with explosive munitions it doesn’t just cause food poisoning. It causes something far more serious, something known as “gas gangrene”.’
Jake’s palms started to sweat. He felt slightly sick.
76
Monday
22 August 2005
1115 hours
Fort Halstead, Sevenoaks, Kent
‘What does that mean? What does it do?’ Jake struggled to get his words out.
Bowman glanced down at his notes. ‘Gas gangrene. British naval surgeons described it back in the 1700s. You’ve not heard of it? Well, the first recorded death rate was as high as 46% when tracked back in 1871. It became a common problem with bomb injuries during the American Civil War and World War I. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died from it in the trenches. A soldier would get a blast injury, they’d amputate, but the soldier would have become infected from the Clostridium perfringens bacterium that was present in the trenches. If there was faecal matter from the soldiers relieving themselves in the trenches, so much the worse. The symptoms are a build-up of gas and fluid leaking from joints and limbs. It’s dangerous. The typical incubation period is frequently short, but incubation periods of up to six weeks have been reported. Antibiotics tackle it effectively – but there was little of that back in 1915.’
‘OK. So I get all that. But what’s the connection with Iraq?’ asked Jake.
‘Well, we do know that in 1986 and 1988 the US Government shipped a quantity of Clostridium perfringens to Iraq, along with anthrax, and some other nasty biological things for weapons. Some reports cited they had up to 5,000 litres of Clostridium perfringens for use with explosive munitions during the nineties. That’s why I wanted to know if the bomber had been to Iraq. But you say he hasn’t?’
THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. Page 21
