‘Coffee, sir?’ Toby Armstrong stood in the doorway with a mug already in hand.
‘Thanks.’
Cass waved his new sergeant in and took the drink, and for a second there was an awkward silence. Armstrong was, by all accounts, a likeable character and a good policeman, and although Cass didn’t doubt either, he hadn’t yet seen much evidence of the first. At best they had a polite working relationship. They didn’t go to the pub together. They didn’t discuss their personal lives.
Cass wasn’t bothered by the coolness between them. He was happy as long as the sergeant got on with his job; he could understand why being allocated to the DI who was almost single-handedly bringing down the Met might not be Armstrong’s idea of a great partnership. The sergeant might not have said anything, but it was obvious he didn’t want to get tarred by the Cass Jones brush.
‘The Mitchell death?’
Cass looked up. ‘What about it?’ Barbara Mitchell had been clubbed to death with a tyre-iron in her kitchen a few days before. It was the closest Cass had come to a real case in six months, but it had proved depressingly lacking in anything remotely brain-taxing.
‘I did what you said, brought the husband’s secretary in and let her sweat overnight. She broke at four this morning. She started banging on the cell door, desperate to talk. Said he wasn’t with her after all.’
‘Got someone picking him up?’
‘Already done,’ Armstrong said, ‘and he’s cracked. His confession’s being typed up now.’
‘Good work.’ Cass attempted a smile but it was empty. The Mitchell case had been blindingly obvious from the moment he’d first walked into that house and seen the husband’s scrubbed pink hands and spotless clothes as he stood shaking beside her battered and bleeding body, stammering as he claimed he’d found her that way. It had only ever been a matter of time before they had their confession.
A small huddle of officers gathered in the corner of the Incident Room outside caught his eye, and he frowned.
‘What’s going on with them?’
‘They’re watching the news,’ Armstrong said. ‘A couple of bombs went off in the Moscow Underground during rush hour.’
‘Like ours?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘Poor bastards.’ He meant it too. For a moment he was tempted to go and join the group and watch the disaster unfold in all its glorious televisual Technicolor, but he shook the thought away. The bombings were someone else’s problem, part of the bigger picture that made up the slowly rotting world. For Cass, all that mattered now were the small tragedies, the tiny deaths – the ones he could actually do something about.
‘I’ve got a job for you.’
‘Sir?’
‘Student suicides. I want to know how many there have been in the past month – no, in fact, maybe go back three months. Get me whatever files we’ve got.’
‘London, or nationwide?’
‘London for now.’
‘Can I ask why?’
Cass looked up. Claire could have asked why, and he’d probably have told her, but not this career copper who was
too worried about his own fledgling reputation to relax. ‘No, Armstrong,’ Cass said quietly, ‘you can’t.’
There was the slightest twitch in the other man’s jaw and then the sergeant turned and left. Cass watched him. If only the stupid boy would see that someone among the headshed must think highly of him to have teamed him up with Cass in the middle of this shitstorm, then maybe he’d start to be half the copper he possibly could be.
He closed the door.
By lunchtime Cass had finished his own bland report on the Mitchell case and Armstrong had printed out all the information he’d requested. He’d had a message from Eagleton, who was running a full autopsy on Jasmine Green, the girl they’d found this morning, and would get back to him as soon as possible. Cass looked at the small pile of papers in front of him and wondered who was more intrigued by this case, the ME’s assistant, or Cass himself. Eagleton’s curiosity had been roused for sure, but as Cass sifted through the documents Armstrong had brought him, he felt a tingle in the pit of his stomach. He’d started to think he’d lost that feeling.
It appeared that a depressingly large number of young people felt the urge to end their lives before they’d grown up enough to realise they could live through a whole lot worse shit than the angst that comes from being somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two. As he scanned through their tragedies, he didn’t let his eyes linger too long on the invariably smiling photographs. If you let too many of the dead grip you, they’d pull you down and drown you. He’d learned that fast.
Over the past three months there’d been nine suicides among London’s student population. Cass put five of them
in a separate pile, to be ignored; there was nothing unusual about any of them – a teenager who had always been bullied; a young woman with a history of depression – and more importantly, all five dead had left notes explaining their actions.
The other four, however, he laid out carefully across his desk. Four suicides in just over two weeks, spread across the capital. The files were sparse on information, even Katie Dodds’. He looked at her photo. Dark hair, pretty. Green eyes. Then he looked at the second image, the words finger-painted in blood on the wall.
Chaos in the darkness
. No note, other than that one sentence. His eyes flicked over the attached sheet of paper. Popular student, talented artist. No hint of depression.
The second file was James Busby’s, a twenty-year-old sports science second-year student at the Richmond campus of Brunel University. Cut his wrists in the bath in a student house in Hounslow four days before Katie Dodds slashed hers on her bed in Chelsea. He’d been the rugby team captain. He’d passed all his exams thus far, in the way that the popular kids always do: not top of the class, but doing enough work to get by and still have a social life. Cass’s eyes caught on the final paragraph of the report.
No evidence of foul play. Deceased sent text to mother from bathroom. Chaos in the darkness. Mother didn’t understand it, she tried to call and received no answer. There was no further communication from her son, who was found dead by another resident of his house thirty minutes later
.
Cass’s heart thumped more loudly. There it was again, in black and white.
Chaos in the darkness
. What did it mean – and more importantly, what the hell did it mean to these kids? He looked at the last two files. Angie Lane and Cory Denter. Angie had been an accountancy and business
student at the South Bank University. She’d been quiet but friendly. Her flatmate had returned to find her dead on the kitchen floor a week ago. There was a pile of chopped carrots on the side. Angie had been cutting up vegetables and at some point decided that cutting her own wrists open was preferable to finishing whatever she’d decided to cook. She left no note.
Cass jotted down the address of her flat, the name of her flatmate and her parents’ contact details. She might not have left an obvious message behind, but he needed to find out for himself. Cory Denter’s story was similar: he was a second-year medical student at Bart’s with no signs of depression. He’d slit his wrists with a scalpel the most efficient way, vertically, not horizontally, in his car on his parents’ drive in Lewisham. He was a live-at-home student. Cass added his address to Angie Lane’s.
Cory Denter had died only four days earlier, so he’d go there first. There had been no suicide note for Cory either, and Cass knew full well what he’d be facing when he turned up at the Denter house: all their grief, and wonder – and then, on top of that, he’d feel the awful weight of their expectation that maybe he’d be able to provide the answers for them, to give them some closure.
He stood up. The parents didn’t concern him so much. Their grief would be painful, but it was their grief, not his own, and he could live with their expectations. He’d done that before. He looked down at the four faces on his desk once more before gathering up the files and putting them in his top drawer. It was the expectations of the dead that he had a hard time dealing with. The dead didn’t let go.
A
bigail Porter had become good at being relatively invisible over the years, no mean feat for a woman who stood six foot tall in flat shoes, especially when most of that height was taken up by spectacular long, slim legs. Still, as she stood by the door in Alison McDonnell’s private office it was clear that neither the Prime Minister, nor the Home Secretary, nor David Fletcher, the head of ATD, the Anti-Terror Division, the new hard core at the heart of the country’s counter-terrorism agencies, considered her to be in the room. She was like a ghost imprinted on the wallpaper, there, but not there. As she idly listened to the serious voices, she was pleased about that. Next door, the PM’s admin secretary would be just leaving for lunch. In ten minutes’ time McDonnell would be leaving to meet the other members of the Cabinet for the emergency briefing. Abigail needed two or three minutes of unnoticed time between those two events.
‘We’re almost certain that all five of the 26/09 bombs were made of Semtex, rather than the usual home-made organic compounds used in 7/7 and 13/12,’ Fletcher started.
‘Semtex?’
‘Military grade.’
‘I take it this isn’t a good thing.’ McDonnell said.
‘In itself, it shouldn’t make much difference. Without
trying to be crude, it doesn’t matter what it’s made of; if it explodes and kills people, then a bomb is a bomb. What’s of more concern is the lack of any polymer residue at any of the sites. All military-grade Semtex manufactured since 2002 has a post-detonation taggant which leaves behind traces of chemicals, allowing the batch to be identified and traced. And if it’s not military grade, then it should be orange. None of these explosions left residue, and trace evidence suggests the plastique was white.’
‘What does all that actually mean?’
‘In essence, it suggests that your bombers are both well organised and well funded, and I would suggest that if they’re taking time to purchase Semtex I’d be willing to bet they bought more than they used for 26/09. I very much doubt it’s for sale in small quantities.’
‘Small quantities?’ The Prime Minister grimaced. ‘They virtually
destroyed
Ealing Broadway and Hampstead High Street, and they brought the Underground system to its knees.’
‘It’s certainly efficient, but politically, the use of this kind of Semtex raises some questions. The Czechs are either selling old stock on the black market, or manufacturing new – untraceable – product.’ Fletcher sipped his coffee.
He had strong hands, Abigail noted, with neat, clipped fingernails. He’d be a good lover, she was certain. The thoughts were idle. Two more minutes.
‘Oh, that’s great,’ said Lucius Dawson, the Home Secretary.
‘The whole world’s in recession and keen to blow the hell out of everyone else,’ said the PM, ‘so what do you really expect? The Czechs aren’t well known for their high-class exports, are they?’ She sighed. ‘Beer, Bohemian crystal and bombs are all they’ve got.’
‘We also know the bombs were detonated with mobile phones, and given that at least three of the sites were underground, it’s likely they used the alarm as the trigger – all you have to do is wire a detonator across the vibrate function and it’s done.’
‘That would make sense, especially given the precision of the explosions on Ealing Broadway. They were staggered perfectly to cause maximum casualties.’
Casualties, thought Abigail, was a horribly overused word, a soothing plaster over any number of rotten, cancerous wounds. At the last count, the
casualties
meant the four hundred and eighty-three people who had died on 26 September, and there were still at least thirty more who might join them any moment. And that was without counting the wounded, those blinded and limbless.
Casualties
. There was a true horror in the blandness of that euphemism.
‘It also means there’s no trace of a triggering call – although even if they had been call-detonated, they’ll all be pay-as-you-go sims, so we’d be none the wiser. The best we could hope for would be to find a common link.’
‘That has to stop,’ the PM muttered. ‘I don’t want
anyone
in this country with a phone that can’t be traced right back to them.’
‘With your permission, ma’am’ – for the first time Fletcher sounded hesitant – ‘I’d like to share some of this information with my opposite number in Moscow.’
There was a slight hitch of breath from the Home Secretary.
‘Why? For all we know Russian terrorists were behind these bombs, despite what happened today.’
Fletcher shook his head. ‘We’ve had none of the normal claims of responsibility, nothing from the Chechens, Al
Qaeda or Red Terror. If the Russians were involved, Red Terror would have claimed it by now.’
‘You may have a point,’ she conceded. ‘So does this mean we’re dealing with a new terrorist threat?’
‘We could be,’ Fletcher admitted, ‘and if we are, then I’m curious about the similarities between what happened here two weeks ago and what happened in Moscow today. Then we’ll be able to gauge the level of threat, and perhaps get some idea of what they were hoping to achieve.’
‘Terror.’ The PM spoke softly. ‘I should imagine they were hoping to achieve terror.’
‘And we’re no closer to IDing the bombers themselves?’ the Home Secretary asked.
‘No, although we’re still piecing together CCTV images – a lot of cameras were damaged, as you can imagine.’
Abigail took a small step sideways and slipped out through the door and into Emily’s office. The desk was abandoned, just as she’d expected. Emily was a mouse, and a creature of habit. She ate her lunch at exactly the same time every day, regular as clockwork. Death by routine.
Keeping one eye on the door in front of her, Abigail hit ctrl/alt/del and brought up the log-in screen. Emily had dutifully logged herself out, but it hadn’t taken much to figure out her password. The morning she’d found the note pushed under her front door, Abigail had made it her business to have lunch with Emily. Abigail had asked her gently probing questions, and listening to the girl’s mindless drivel had quickly produced what she needed – the minute Emily mentioned that she had a dog, Abigail had known what her password would be. It was predictably sentimental. She typed quickly and the home screen appeared. She went straight to the Internet browser and brought up Hotmail, her heart thumping, as it had been every time she’d tried
this over the past two weeks. The beat was a strange reassurance that she was still alive, despite the cold grey cloud that had enveloped her soul. She hadn’t brought the note with her. She didn’t need to. The words on it were imprinted in her mind.
You’ll need this. You’ll know when
.
Username:
[email protected]
Password: Salvation
She’d found it the morning after the bombings: a small, sealed white envelope with the folded paper inside. She should have handed it over to Special Branch or MI5, or at least the PM – she should definitely have given it to
someone
. The note had been screaming at her to hand it over – but she hadn’t, she’d brought it in with her. She’d intended to tell McDonnell, but instead she found herself eating lunch with Emily and thinking if she was going to compromise a computer, then Emily’s was a better choice than her own.
So here she was again, her career in her hands as she stared at the home screen. The disappointment was almost overwhelming. The inbox was empty. The whole account was empty. She frowned. So what was the point of it – how was she supposed to know when she’d need it? She closed the screen down and deleted the browser history. Maybe if a message did ever appear, then she’d pass the whole thing on.
Maybe
. She replaced the chair exactly as she’d found it and headed back to the door. Or maybe she was just telling herself a big fat lie. There was a promise in that note, and it had been made to her.
‘We’re cross-referencing all the tapes,’ Fletcher was still speaking as Abigail resumed her place by the door, ‘checking for people entering the sites with bags and leaving without them. If they used alarm settings to detonate the bombs,
then there’s a chance the bombers weren’t suicides. They could have left themselves time to get out.’
‘Without raising suspicion?’
Fletcher shrugged. ‘They wouldn’t need long, just a few minutes. And even if someone spotted the bag between stops, whoever planted it could have got out at the previous station and left before it was detonated, if he moved fast enough.’
‘You really don’t think suicide bombings?’
‘We can’t be sure one way or the other at this point, but this silence is strange. Suicide bombers leave a message: it’s the nature of suicide, to want to explain yourself, and all terror organisations use that to propagandise their message. They send us videos so we’re sure who did it and why and in the name of which God they’re blowing the shit out of themselves and everyone around them. And as yet, we’ve received no messages whatsoever from whomever is responsible for these attacks.’
‘You think the Russians have had a message?’
‘Nothing on intel about it.’ Fletcher’s stare was direct.
Abigail didn’t think the man was capable of anything else. There was a straightforwardness about him that in the double-dealing world of politics might be mistaken for a lesser intelligence by the less intelligent politicians. But David Fletcher wasn’t stupid; he was dangerously sharp in his clinical evaluations in just about any given situation.
‘Speak to them,’ the PM said, ‘but don’t give them everything. It will be tricky, because the media’s been quick to put the blame on the Russians, and we haven’t done much to dissipate that in case it disrupts the fragile peace we’ve got going with the Middle East. We can’t be seen to be blaming
them
at the moment, can we? Not until next month’s summit is done.’
‘I’ll tread carefully.’
The Prime Minister looked up at her counter-terrorism commander. ‘Make sure you do.’
Abigail watched the woman she was paid to protect. Unlike David Fletcher, Alison McDonnell understood politics; more than that, she got how the world worked. She might not always like it, but she understood it, and that was what made her such a good player at the game. And that’s all this life and death business ever really was – a game.
The
game. That was what Fletcher would never understand: that there was no point in taking it too seriously, because at the end of the day it was all just moves and counter-moves, winners and losers. Abigail thought of the empty Hotmail account. It might be a cold, dangerous game, but it was all there was. And now someone was trying to lure her back into it.
And that was interesting.