THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author.

by David Videcette

  ‘So when he lied to your face, while looking you in the eye, you could challenge him?’ Jake put on a deliberate, fake smile. He hoped Shahid could see just how false it was.

  Shahid said nothing.

  ‘So that when the little fucker lied to you, you’d be ready to reprimand him? Ready to smack him?’ Jake had never smacked his kids but he knew plenty of people that did.

  ‘I probably would, yes.’

  ‘What makes you think I would come here without knowing things before I talk to you, Shahid? What makes you think you can look me in the eye and lie to me?’

  Shahid crossed his legs on the desk. They were on his turf. He was showing them that this was his domain and he could do what he liked. That he thought he was still in charge.

  ‘If you have questions to ask me then ask me,’ he replied.

  There was an arrogance about this man. He was arrogant in a way that Jake had previously seen whilst working with suspects on the Organised Crime Group. Arrogant like, ‘I’m better than you and you can’t touch me.’

  But on this job, interviewing friends and family of the bombers, Jake hadn’t yet seen anyone quite like this. This man was a very different sort of Muslim.

  Jake was used to the interviewees being helpful, humble, meek.

  Then it clicked: it was bravado. His tone, his manner – bravado to cover his lies.

  Victims often act one way. Witnesses act another way.

  And suspects trying to cover their tracks acted like Shahid.

  ‘I’ve asked you two questions already, Shahid. And neither of your two answers I’m satisfied with. The first question I know you’re lying about, and the second one all you’ve done is ignore.’

  ‘Now hang on.’ Shahid took his feet off the desk and leaned forward.

  ‘No, Shahid, you fucking hang on.’ Jake stood up abruptly. His chair caught the back of his legs and fell backwards onto the floor with a crash. Jake’s voice was a half shout.

  It caught Shahid off guard.

  Because of this guy, they’d missed the early Friday-night getaway. Every time Shahid insisted to them that he didn’t know Wasim, some more of Lenny’s sixty-five hours with his wife would be eaten into.

  Jake was getting pissed off. Still standing, both arms resting on the desk now, he leaned over and stared Shahid directly in the eyes. ‘I’m going to give you one last chance, Shahid. Answer me like you think I’m some sort of fucking idiot again and you will be really fucking sorry.’ Jake’s words were resolute and purposeful. He asked very slowly and deliberately this time. ‘I want… to know… how you… knew… Wasim?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Jake had had enough. Shahid wasn’t going to tell the truth unless he put him under real pressure. He had to bluff it. But he was also banking on the fact that no one who was actually guilty had ever called him on a bluff.

  He had nothing concrete except the phone records, and a complete and utter feeling of being given the runaround by someone who was clearly lying to them. But he couldn’t reveal what he knew. You hold back your kings and your aces. You play your fours. Just like in poker, he reminded himself.

  He needed Shahid to think that they knew everything, without him finding out that they only had some phone links.

  Jake glanced at the door. Lenny was acting like a bouncer. Shahid was cornered.

  Neither he nor Lenny would now get home at a reasonable hour that evening, which made him angry but, equally, his aim was to use that anger to full effect in playing a part. It was all he had left in his armoury.

  He stood up straight, to his full height, all the while looking Shahid in the eye. Then he picked up his notepad and, with huge force, slammed it down on the desk, bellowing in the loudest voice he had. ‘For fuck’s sake! Right, Len, I’ve had enough of this wanker! I’ve given him his chance. Ring London! Get the custody suite ready. We can keep him down south for a month! He can decide down there what lies to tell!’

  Shahid looked alarmed. He obviously wasn’t used to the sight of a Metropolitan Police copper with a Cockney swagger getting loud and unpleasant in his office on a Friday evening. He was clearly very unsettled by it. His demeanour changed instantly.

  ‘But I can’t go down to London. I’m giving Dawah. Me and my brother in Bristol this weekend!’ he said anxiously. ‘My voluntary work. It’s all planned. There’s ten of us going. I can’t be in London. We’re staying at the mosque over there. It’s all arranged. We’re doing our neighbourhood visits.’

  Jake knew he had no authority to arrest him. He was making his own luck here, but it seemed to be working. He grabbed his handcuffs and swiftly moved around behind the desk as if to arrest Shahid, but just before Jake made contact with him, Shahid threw his arms up in the air.

  ‘Stop, look I didn’t know him. He just used to visit someone that I rent a room to!’

  Fuck me, that worked, thought Jake.

  Jake and Lenny exchanged glances. If there was really nothing fishy here, why would he have covered that up?

  ‘Right,’ said Jake. ‘Get up. Follow my good detective sergeant to our car. Take us to this friend.’

  ‘Err, well, he’s done a runner. I can’t take you to him,’ replied Shahid, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘Where’s the place you used to rent out to him?’

  ‘I’ve got a sandwich shop. There’s a flat above there.’

  ‘Right, Len, you’re driving,’ shouted Jake as he chucked the car keys at Lenny.

  They marched Shahid out of the office and through the supermarket to the car parked across the road.

  ‘You’re in the back with me, mate, with the handcuffs on,’ said Jake.

  Shahid might have lost some of his front, but Jake had no intention of dropping his.

  88

  Friday

  26 August 2005

  1930 hours

  The flat above the sandwich shop, Chapeltown, Leeds, West Yorkshire

  Shahid was quiet. He spoke only to give a rough indication of where the flat was located. Jake was glad he’d put the handcuffs on him. It was still a game of cat and mouse and Jake had to show that he was in control. Shahid could still be dangerous, even if he was looking fairly worried.

  And look worried he did. Jake watched as a bead of sweat danced its way down his face and onto his lip. As they got into the back seat of the vehicle, Jake moved toward Shahid, pushing him right across the vehicle and against the car door, behind the passenger seat on the other side. The child locks were on in the back; they couldn’t be opened from the inside. Shahid was trapped.

  You always sat prisoners behind the front passenger seat, not behind the driver. Jake had learned that the hard way when still in his probationary period as a uniformed constable. He’d arrested a shoplifter; she’d been playing the buy-one-get-one-free game at Asda. On the way to the station, Jake had sat the shoplifter behind Stan, the officer driving the patrol car. The shoplifter hadn’t been handcuffed and had been chatting away happily the whole time. Halfway there, the woman had suddenly gone crazy and grabbed Stan round the throat from behind. Jake had been too slow to stop her; their vehicle had left the road and hit a lamp post. Luckily it was just the car and the lamp post that had been hurt, but Stan blamed Jake for the mistake and refused to work with him ever again.

  Jake had six months in the job versus Stan’s twenty-two years, but he still got the blame. She’d been his prisoner and he had been sitting next to her.

  All three of them could have died that day. He never forgot that lesson from the panda car.

  Looking across at Shahid, Jake couldn’t help but wonder what this bloke had done. Finding out what that thing was – that was going to be hard work.

  Shahid directed them to a pay-and-display, council-owned car park.

  ‘The room is in there, above the sandwich shop,’ Shahid said,
pointing with both handcuffed hands to a large, external staircase that ran from the car park up to some first-floor flats above the retail units.

  They got out of the car, climbed the wrought-iron stairs and passed through a shabby wooden door that was unlocked. The place smelled of cooking fat. The beige carpet underfoot was filthy, black and sticky in places.

  ‘That door there, Wasim knew the guy who used to live there,’ Shahid said, indicating a blue door with the letter ‘C’ on it.

  Jake knocked on the door and a short black guy with a goatee beard answered. The stench of cannabis almost knocked Jake out.

  ‘Yeah? Whadda ya want?’ asked the black guy.

  ‘I need you to step out of the room and go and wait downstairs for me, mate,’ said Jake, flashing his badge. ‘Police business. Nothing to do with you – it’s the room I’m interested in.’

  Lenny took hold of the black guy and led him down the corridor. Jake and Shahid were alone in the room. He told Shahid to sit on the bed.

  Jake glanced around, taking it all in. It was just one large room containing a double bed, two wardrobes, a chest of drawers and, in the corner, a weightlifting bench. The carpet was light grey with a deep pile.

  ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ Jake asked.

  ‘Shared bathroom down the hall,’ replied Shahid.

  Jake stood in the middle of the almost bare room, his arms crossed, his back to Shahid. Lenny had returned and guarded the door.

  Opposite Jake were three massive double windows that looked out over the road at the front of the property.

  Across the road he could see children in a playground, avoiding the calls from their parents to come in for their consecutive teas.

  The sun was getting lower in the sky. It generously shared its last warm rays across the patchwork of hand-shaped leaves belonging to the horse chestnut trees that towered over the park.

  Jake knew that Wasim had frequented this area of Leeds often, according to the cell-site data they held on his mobile calls, but so what? What did that prove? That Wasim came here for the pleasant view? Surely not, thought Jake.

  He desperately needed some evidence, yet despite it being a large room, it was pretty much empty. There was nothing to go on.

  What the fuck have I got myself into now? thought Jake as he stood silently bereft in the middle of the room. Was this just another dead end? Like the trip to see Shaggy had been? The confused look on the old man’s face after they’d kicked his door down in Sheffield jumped into his head.

  The room was bare and stark, a far cry from all that junk piled high in Victoria Park. He remembered Geoff, the EXPO’s words, ‘Rather them than me in that small place with a load of explosives equipment… What if it all went up in one go? What sort of idiot assembles all three parts of a bomb in one tiny flat?’

  Jake looked over at Shahid, who was still sweating.

  Why was Shahid so worried?

  Jake felt that he had few options here. Either he had to nick him or, well, there was no plan B.

  Staring out of those large windows, it occurred to him that the curtains looked brand new, whereas the rest of the room looked tired and worn.

  New drapes? Jake went over and touched the heavy, blue-velvet curtains. They didn’t look like they had been used at all. There were no net curtains.

  He wondered if parkgoers got a nice view in from across the road when the lights were on inside the flat.

  And then he saw it.

  89

  Friday

  26 August 2005

  1945 hours

  The flat above the sandwich shop, Chapeltown, Leeds, West Yorkshire

  There, on one of the white, UPVC window frames. One small piece of roughly torn, off-white masking tape.

  It was stuck to the right-hand edge of one of the frames.

  In all the places Jake had ever seen, in all the places he’d ever searched during his entire career, he’d only ever seen masking tape stuck to one other window frame.

  ‘I want you out! I’m seizing control of this room! Gimme the keys. I want every set of keys there are!’ he shouted.

  Lenny looked at Jake, totally bemused.

  ‘What’s up, guv’nor?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. You won’t believe me. Take our friend down and put him back in the car. I need to make some calls.’

  Lenny pulled Shahid to his feet and led him out of the door.

  Jake pulled out his mobile and called Denswood to explain about the masking tape he’d found.

  ‘And that’s the basis for you saying it’s a bomb factory?’ Malcolm Denswood laughed down the phone.

  Jake took a deep breath. ‘Sir, it’s got a theory behind it. Look, when Wasim and his team had been cooking up explosives in the Victoria Park flat, we know they’d had to keep the windows open because of the fumes. The chemicals were so strong that all the paint had blistered on the window frames and the hedges outside had died. To stop passers-by peering in, they’d taped the net curtains to the window frames. They used masking tape to do that! We saw the masking tape at Victoria Park in the same place. This room is no different! And the bloke’s a liar. I don’t know why, but he’s worried sick about something.’

  ‘You want me to send a forensics team on a hunch?’

  Denswood wasn’t backing down, but nor was Jake. ‘I’ll take whatever resources you can give me, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Look, I’ll send you one bloke. That’s all you’re getting. And Jake – think yourself lucky. It may have escaped your notice, but it’s a Friday night, for Christ’s sake!’

  90

  Saturday

  27 August 2005

  1000 hours

  The flat above the sandwich shop, Chapeltown, Leeds, West Yorkshire

  Jake’s one forensics guy had arrived. Rick Benson wasn’t particularly happy about being sent up from London on a weekend’s wild goose chase to Leeds. Jake made him swab the room several times.

  At the third time, Rick sighed loudly. ‘What are you hoping to achieve from this?’

  ‘I want it all swabbed. Again. Thoroughly. I want to know if there are fingerprints and explosives in here. If we find any other fingerprints in this room, they might be other potential bombers.’

  ‘But it’s too big to swab properly and it’s too bare. There’s nothing in here that’s of any use to us. You can want all you like, but you won’t always get it. It’s almost two months after the event. Some other bloke’s been living here since then.’

  ‘What about the carpet?’ asked Jake. ‘What about taking all the carpet up?’

  ‘What is that going to prove? How does that move this investigation on?’

  Jake rolled his eyes at Rick’s lack of enthusiasm for the job in hand. ‘Look, we’ve found one bomb factory but a bomb consists of different parts: the main charge, the initiator, a power source and a trigger. If you’re properly trained, you’d never manufacture or store each of the parts in the same place because it’s just too dangerous. You’d construct the different parts in different places and keep all the parts separate as long as possible. It’s common sense. They’ve been up to something in here. Shahid is a liar. I want to find out what’s in that carpet.’

  Rick wasn’t convinced. ‘Mate, the carpet won’t fit in my van. I’ve been told this is a low-key search. You’re out on limb here. It’s a load of old bollocks. No one is giving this any significance.’

  ‘I want to know what’s in the carpet,’ repeated Jake.

  He remembered that he’d once spilled emulsion paint on a brand new carpet back home. He knew at the time that Stephanie would go through the roof; it had only just been laid. So he’d wet down the carpet, then put a damp flannel on the back of the hoover instead of attaching the bag. When he’d vacuumed, he’d caught everything in it and most of the paint had come up, thank God!

&nbs
p; ‘We need a hoover,’ said Jake, ‘here’s some cash. Go and get me a hoover. Let’s see what’s been in here.’

  When Rick returned from his shopping trip, they vacuumed one square metre of the carpet together, and Rick took a Pandora’s box of dust back down to London with him.

  91

  Tuesday

  30 August 2005

  1012 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Jake gripped his coffee mug tightly between his hands in an attempt to bury his frustration. He sat in a small office on the second floor, looking at the TV screen, his notepad and pen beside him. His mug held just water, which he sipped at regular intervals, trying to fight off the dehydration from another hangover. It wasn’t working.

  The meeting room in London appeared to be bursting at the seams. There were people stood on all sides of the table and not enough chairs to go around.

  ‘We’re currently looking at all the slack space for anything of use, sir,’ continued one of the forensic computing geeks in London.

  Lenny began to giggle.

  ‘Slack space – you’ve seen plenty of that, hey, Jake?’ whispered Lenny as he nudged Jake with his elbow.

  ‘Forgive me for sounding stupid, but what exactly is slack space?’ asked Denswood.

  ‘Well, lots of people in the police who know nothing about computers and how they work mistakenly believe that once a file is deleted on a drive, it can’t be recovered. In fact, all that happens is that you delete the filename and the ability of your computer to find it again. Any information in the file remains there, on the hard drive as before. That means that the space is open; it’s slack. Sometimes even when the space is overwritten with something else, another file, we can still see fragments of what was there originally. Does that make sense now for the novices?’

  The computer geek sounded a little too smug to Jake’s ears.

  ‘And how long do I need to allow you to look into this slack space before you can tell me if there’s anything decent in there?’ asked Denswood, sounding slightly annoyed. He didn’t like the tone of the condescending PC nerd either, thought Jake.