‘Christ!’ Riley pulled Roman and another officer down on to the ground with him as the vast compressed dust cloud engulfed them. The officer who had been breaking down the door lay motionless beside his battering ram, half in and half out of the doorway. Down below, the sound of crashing, twisting metal screamed as what remained of the tube train smashed both into itself and into the walls of the tunnel. Later, the blasted driver’s cab at the front of the train would appear at the end of the eastbound platform of Tower Hill station, slowly and horrifically coming into view to the officers still searching the platforms.
İkmen only blacked out for a second. Unlike Ayşe, he didn’t actually crack his head when he was thrown up against the wall. But he was disorientated and for a few moments he couldn’t catch his breath. The air was filled with dust and what tasted like metal and if he tried to breathe in he felt as if his chest would burst. Then there was the noise. It was like the earthquake of 1999, crashing and shuddering below him as if some monster of the deep had awakened in a fury, hell bent upon rising to the surface on some terrifying mission of revenge. Everything in him recoiled from the sound and for a moment he just curled himself up into a foetal shape and howled. But as he unravelled himself, he saw that Ayşe was lying quite still beside him. Instinctively he called out in Turkish, ‘Help! Help me!’
But not a soul responded. He pulled himself across the concrete towards her and put his head down to her mouth. She wasn’t breathing. With a superhuman effort of will he made himself remember some English and he yelled, ‘Ayşe isn’t breathing! Help me!’
He could hear screaming. Whether it was from down below or in the underpass, İkmen couldn’t tell. Desperate, he tried to rise to his feet but his legs seemed to be made of jelly and his attempt left him stranded on the ground like a beached fish. ‘Help me!’
He looked at Ayşe. She still wasn’t breathing. But then suddenly, out of the dust and filth that surrounded him, the figure of a man appeared. He came from the All Hallows end of the underpass and he had some sort of mask over the lower half of his face. He was in Metropolitan Police uniform.
‘Help her!’
In one rapid movement the officer picked Ayşe up and then turned to run with her back down the underpass. Another man, also in uniform, bent down and pulled İkmen to his feet. His legs were still shaking but as he leaned against the man he found that he could just about manage to put one foot in front of the other. When they got to the stairs, the officer picked İkmen up in his arms and carried him out into the open air. It felt so cool and sweet, he almost cried.
‘There are other officers in the subway,’ İkmen said as the officer placed him on a bench beside the church. On the pavement just to the side of him, a man was breathing into Ayşe Kudu’s mouth. The noise all around, although not as terrifying as the sounds he had heard from the tunnel, was tremendous. Sirens wailing, people shouting, emergency vehicles pulling up and paramedics, firemen and police officers getting out of them.
A woman in a green jumpsuit put a blanket round İkmen’s shoulders and looked deep into his eyes and said, ‘Are you all right, my love?’
‘There are other officers down there,’ İkmen said and pointed to the smoke-swathed entrance to the underpass. ‘They’re hurt.’
‘We’ll get you to hospital soon,’ the woman said with a smile.
‘I’m fine,’ İkmen said. In a way it was true, he felt a little sore and his lungs hurt but he wasn’t bleeding and he didn’t feel sick. ‘You must get the others. The others are hurt.’
She smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart.’ She straightened and began to move away. ‘We’ll get to them.’
He turned to see how Ayşe was doing but she was no longer in sight. İkmen began to feel cold. He also began to feel as if he wanted to lie down and sleep. He knew he didn’t want to go to hospital. There was no need. They’d only treat him for shock and he knew how to deal with that without a doctor telling him. A chocolate bar and a cigarette usually fixed most things. Not that he had any chocolate on him. But he did have cigarettes and so as soon as his hands stopped shaking he lit one.
İkmen threw everything in his stomach up on to the pavement in one huge, glittering arc. When he had finished, he felt much better. He lit another cigarette and began to walk towards the Tower of London and the river.
The officer who had battered in the door that led down to the old station was dead. Flung backwards by the blast from the explosion down below, he had landed on the concrete floor on his head. Everyone else in Riley’s team had survived so far, although all of them were now on their way to various local hospitals.
Superintendent Williams was speaking on his mobile phone to his superiors, the acting and the assistant commissioners.
‘Yes . . . Yes . . .’ he said as he ascended the stairs behind All Hallows with Inspector Carla Fratelli. ‘Yes, one officer dead and one just about clinging on . . . No . . . We’re going down now. Yes, I will let you know.’
Voices, some screaming, ripped up at them from the earth below. Fratelli shuddered.
When they reached the mangled doorway leading down into the old station they were met by a group of fire officers. A particularly grimy individual stepped forward and said, ‘I’m ACFO Harwood from Dowgate Station.’
Williams knew that Dowgate was the closest station to the site. They’d got to the scene very quickly.
‘Superintendent Williams,’ he said and held out his hand to the acting chief fire officer.
Harwood shook his hand. ‘What looks like an eight-carriage train has suffered an explosion as it was travelling east through the old station. Vehicle was full and so we’ve got multiple casualties down there. The station itself appears to be undamaged and we’ve managed to get some lights put up. The old platform, such as it was, is quite a state.’
‘Are there any medics down there?’
‘Yes,’ Harwood said. ‘From Barts. There was also one on the train. At the back. He’s shaken up but he’s unhurt and he’s helping others. We’ve no idea as yet as to numbers of casualties. But we’re taking them out here and through Tower Hill.’
‘Can we look?’
Harwood passed them both mouth masks and said, ‘Stand at the top of the stairs. As I said, we’ve got lights up.’
Williams and Fratelli stepped through the door and found themselves at the top of a mottled, rickety staircase. Large arc lamps had been strung above the tortured train carriages and smashed platform. The air was filled with smoke and dust which lent a sinister diffuseness to the scene. Williams was aware of groans of pain as well as the screams he had heard from the subway. The carriage at the far eastern end of the platform, near the front of the train, was trapped, concertinaed down to maybe half its size between the platform and the tunnel wall. No sound or movement came from it. The one directly behind it moved a little as two fire officers used cutting tools to remove its windows. There was no sound coming from it either. But further along the train towards the west, fire officers were helping bloodied men and women stagger on to what remained of the platform. One man, sobbing uncontrollably, was carried from a carriage further back. As the fire officer carrying him walked past Williams and Fratelli, they could both see that he had only one hand. Where the other had been there was just a large blood-soaked piece of cloth.
Williams took his mouth mask off and said, ‘God help us!’
Chapter 26
Çetin İkmen knew that he wasn’t himself. But he also knew that he wasn’t ill. In fact he felt rather lighter and airier than he had for a long time – in a sense. He was worried about Ayşe. He assumed she’d been taken to hospital and knew that if he consented to go to hospital too he may well find out more. But İkmen and hospitals had never mixed easily and so when he left the back of All Hallows and staggered down towards the Tower of London, he knew what he was doing – getting away. Williams and the others wouldn’t let him help with the horror down in the old station and in a way that was a good thing. Although he had never balked at staring the reality of man’s inhumanity to man straight in the eye, he had attended his fill of hideous explosions. If they had let him help with rescuing the victims or counselling the shocked and wounded, he would have done that gladly. But İkmen knew that they wanted their foreign guest kept secure and safe. That meant hospital and that was just where he wasn’t going.
He went where Ayşe had taken him, down Thames Path, by the river. A light breeze was blowing down the river and the coolness of it on his face felt good. Behind him, up on Tower Hill, all hell had broken loose. But he couldn’t look at that. Someone should have known about old Mark Lane station. If the sounds he had heard coming from the tube tunnel were anything to go by, a lot of people had been killed and injured. Ayşe Kudu among them. He should have protected her. He had no idea how, but he knew he should have done so. Had she been his own Ayşe, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, he would have made sure she got out of the underpass even if he’d had to die in the attempt. That, as her immediate superior, was part of his job.
More sirens sounded and he heard some people who passed him say, ‘Bloody Islamic nutters!’ He felt both angry and ashamed. That someone like Ali Reza Hajizadeh should distort the religion so beloved by his wife and many of his friends and family made İkmen furious. The essentials of Islam revolved around love and respect. But in this particular case, a secular person like himself was involved too. Ahmet Ülker had at the least facilitated the bombing. He had allowed or even encouraged Ayatollah Nourazar to recruit in his factories, Hajizadeh and Harrison had hidden in his car and maybe in his house. Ülker, in fact, had been key to the whole operation. But how on earth could the deaths of Londoners he didn’t know help him?
İkmen leaned against the wall that separated Thames Path from the river and lit a cigarette. He looked at the oddly shaped glass building that Ayşe had told him was City Hall. That was where the London Assembly, those who made policy for the capital, met. Mr Üner, the slick young mayor whose parents were Turkish immigrants, was in overall control. How wonderful, İkmen felt, that someone from such humble beginnings should end up as mayor of London. Working in a weird but fantastic building set in such a prestigious and lovely location. Now he looked at it, City Hall was situated in a small park. In that it was like his own place of work, behind Sultanahmet Park. But Mr Üner made rather more use of his park than İkmen did of his. He went out jogging. But then Ayşe had told him that Üner sometimes had to have a cigarette too. How weird modern life was! Thinking about this made İkmen laugh at first but then very quickly what had been funny was suddenly overtaken by the tragedy he could hear unfolding behind him. Tears ran down his cheeks. They blurred his sight, making the strange building on the south bank appear even more distorted than it really was. He went to dig into his pocket for a handkerchief when his attention was caught by the sound of screaming.
At first he thought that maybe it came from behind him but the sound that he heard did not come from that direction. He looked first left and then right, but he was entirely alone. Only one direction remained and so he looked back across the water again. What he saw was a car pulling up to the side of the building and some people milling around at the front. He couldn’t make out individuals but there was a general impression of suitedness which made him assume that they were probably all men. At least one of them was shouting now but he couldn’t hear what was being said. İkmen narrowed his eyes. Then suddenly he understood what was happening and it made him go white with fear. Now, at last, everything was clear to him.
‘That was DI Roman from Barts,’ Superintendent Williams said as he watched yet another dead body being stretchered out of the old station and into the underpass. ‘I’m afraid that Sergeant Ayşe Kudu, our colleague from Manchester, has just died.’
Inspector Fratelli shook her head. ‘Oh, my God.’
‘She was bleeding into her brain. They tried to relieve the pressure . . .’ He shrugged. ‘She died on the operating table. Carla, I’m going to have Ülker brought in and I’m going to tell DI Roman’s men to move in on his factories. We can’t wait any longer.’
‘Sir—’
‘Sir, this place is filling up,’ another, rougher voice cut in, one of the firemen. ‘We need to get a makeshift morgue erected up on the surface.’
Williams looked at the roughly covered line of bodies that lay on the concrete, an ever lengthening line from the northern end of the underpass to the southern end at All Hallows Church.
‘A marquee – anything,’ the fire officer said.
‘Yes,’ Williams said. ‘Yes.’ He took his phone out of his pocket. ‘Of course. I’m sorry, we’ve just discovered that one of our colleagues has died, I—’
‘Sorry about that, sir,’ the fire officer said, ‘but—’
‘Superintendent Williams!’ Another, foreign voice called down the underpass from the All Hallows end. This was followed by the sight of a small, shabby man hurriedly picking his way through the blanket-covered bodies.
Williams peered at him. ‘Inspector İkmen?’
İkmen was breathing hard. He had run all the way.
‘Superintendent,’ he gasped as he came to a halt in front of Williams and Fratelli. ‘Sir . . . you must get over to City Hall. Now!’
‘City Hall? Inspector İkmen, the emergency is here.’
İkmen shook his head. ‘No, or yes it is, but they are taking the mayor. Over at City Hall, men with guns!’
Williams’s eyes widened.
‘Sir, we must get there now!’ İkmen said. For a couple of seconds Williams said nothing, he seemed quite stunned. ‘Sir!’ İkmen shouted. ‘Sir, Mr Üner will die!’
And then the spell of inaction broke and Williams said, ‘Carla, stay here and get a makeshift morgue organised. I’ll square it with the acting commissioner to have Ülker brought in and his businesses shut down.’ He began to step over the corpses. ‘Come on,’ he said to İkmen, ‘you and I will get over there. Armed, you say?’