by Peter James
He shrugged, saying nothing.
What exactly was Bruno trying to tell him? Was it his way of dealing with his fear of this new paradigm, the terrorist threat that blighted everyone’s lives these days?
Or was something else going on inside his head? A reluctance – or inability – to grasp reality?
‘How would you feel if your best friend was blown up, Bruno?’
‘Erik?’
Erik was his best friend back in Munich. The two of them played competitive online battle games against each other, most days.
‘Yes, Erik.’
‘Then I’d be the winner!’
21
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
No one took any notice of the two men, wearing high-viz jackets over dungarees, pushing a wheelie bin across car park A. Out of immediate sight of the entrance gate, they halted beside a dark-green BMW and opened the rear door. Tipping the bin on its side, the lid opened and they pulled out a young man, roughly, bashing his head on the edge of the door.
He cried out in pain.
They clambered in either side of him, and the waiting driver accelerated away as fast as he dared without drawing attention.
One of them grabbed the boy’s phone and tossed it out of the window.
‘Hey!’ he yelled.
‘We don’t want to be tracked, asshole!’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ the other man in the rear growled, putting his hand on Mungo’s head and pushing him down, roughly, out of sight.
Scared of these aggressive strangers, Mungo did what he was told. He shut the fuck up.
22
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
Roy Grace looked at Bruno, trying to fathom out his son’s thought process.
He glanced back at the camera, then at the glass-fronted Control Room at the far end of the pitch. Come on, come on, guys, when are you announcing the evacuation, for God’s sake?
Then the words of his training came back to him.
Think the unthinkable.
The unthinkable was a bomb detonating at the city’s first Premier League game.
He was thinking hard about the guy in the red baseball cap, who had been looking around nervously, then had hurried from the stand, leaving his camera behind.
Thinking about all he knew of terrorist bombs from his training and from the International Homicide Investigators Association conferences he had attended in the USA over the years, many of them covering in detail terrorist bombing atrocities. One thing that had stuck in his memory was that every bomb needed a detonator. It could be a timer that fired a spark that detonated the device. Or a text sent to a receiver that would detonate it. Or impact. Or a motion sensor.
He did a fast assessment. Looked at his watch. It was less than five minutes or so since the man had left his seat. That ruled out a motion sensor that would set the device off – if it was indeed a bomb. More likely a timer or a text detonator. But the perp would want to be well clear of the stadium grounds before it went off. At five minutes, he would not be, yet.
He made a snap decision.
One he knew might cost him dear. Maybe his career. Perhaps his life.
The words of the former Chief Constable rang in his ears.
Whilst everyone else is running away from danger, we’re the people who run towards it.
‘Stay here,’ he commanded Bruno.
He left his seat, clambered past the rest of the fans in their row, and down the aisle. For a second, he studied the camera on the seat along from the older man and the small boy.
And saw the timer where the shutter-speed setting should have been.
Ticking down as he watched.
1.23
1.22
1.21
23
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
Ylli Prek hurried in through the doors marked SOUTH STAND WASTE MANAGEMENT – NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. He had to trust his boss’s word that the camera outside had been disabled. He entered a foul-smelling room, with a grimy concrete floor and stark tiled walls.
It was filled with green and red bins, mostly with their lids open and overflowing with bagged waste. Labels above them read GLASS, FOOD WASTE, DRY MIXED RECYCLING, GENERAL WASTE.
The last bin on the right, under GENERAL WASTE, had a grey lid that was shut. Ylli opened it, glancing nervously at the door. From the pockets of his tracksuit he removed a bobble hat and scarf. Then he hurriedly stripped off his tracksuit to reveal a blue-and-white Seagulls shirt and blue jeans beneath. He dumped the tracksuit top and bottoms into the bin, along with his cap, and pulled on the bobble hat. Then he walked back to the doors. His boss assured him there would be an evacuation of the stadium, if the bomb did not go off first. All he had to do was to slip out and he would be unnoticed in the panicking crowd all trying to get as far away from the stadium as they could.
But at this moment there was no sound of any panic.
He opened one door a few inches and peered out. He heard the roar of the crowd. The game was still in progress.
He closed the door again, shaking with nerves. Something felt wrong.
24
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
Roy Grace, holding the heavy camera, frightened it would explode at any moment, turned and raced up the stairs towards the stand exit.
.57
.56
Had to get the device away from the players, from the crowds. He looked around. Where?
Where?
Where was safe?
.52
His brain was racing.
Some years ago, shortly after the stadium construction had been completed, he’d been given a tour of the building, along with several other police officers, by the Head of Safety and Security. There was a tunnel on the far side, through which the players came out to the pitch. It ran past the changing rooms, and out to the players’ secure car park at the rear. But that would mean running round the pitch.
Was there a better way?
Then he remembered.
A short distance away was another tunnel. It would probably be deserted now – no members of the public would be there, although there would be plenty above.
Yelling, ‘Police!’ at two startled stewards in the doorway, he sprinted past them and along past the stark, cream columns of the deserted concourse, narrowly missing colliding with a man who came out of the toilets. He reached the tunnel and turned into it, racing past machinery, utterly terrified the camera would detonate at any moment. Then to his dismay he saw steel security shutters, down, at the far end.
No!
.39
Just as he reached them they began to rise, clattering upwards. Agonizingly slowly.
Come on, come on!
.34
The instant there was enough clearance, he ducked under and through into the wide, deserted area outside the ground.
Should he dump the camera here and run?
The wall of the stadium was a hundred metres or so behind him. Too close.
Had to get it further away. At this distance, the EOD might still want a full evacuation.
.27
He sprinted on towards the station, running down the incline, beneath the railway bridge and towards the deserted university rugby pitch. As he reached the barrier fence, the timer showed nine seconds left. He hurled the camera as hard as he could at the playing fields and watched it tumble through the air, then as it fell towards the grass he threw himself to the ground and waited, breathless, gulping down air.
He heard only the faintest thud.
Nothing more.
A whole minute passed.
Nothing.
He continued waiting, then cautiously stood up and peered across at the camera lying in the grass some distance away. His shirt stuck to his back; he was drenched in sweat.
‘Good throw, sir!’
He tur
ned to see a steward in a high-viz jacket.
‘Thank you,’ he gasped, tugging out his handkerchief to mop away the perspiration running down his forehead.
‘You’re blooming nuts, if you don’t mind my saying, sir!’
Grace grinned. ‘I’m OK with that.’
‘I was in the army, out in Afghanistan. I once had to lob a grenade that had been tossed into our foxhole. Never managed to throw it as far as that.’
‘Yep, well, I just closed my eyes and imagined it was a rugby ball.’
The steward shook his head. ‘Tut-tut. Saying that at a football game, sir, that’s heresy, that is.’
Several more stewards and police officers rushed out towards them.
25
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
Mungo, Kipp Brown wondered, watching the game but very distracted by his son’s absence.
Where on earth are you, Mungo?
No way would he be missing the game, he had talked of little else for the past three months.
Suddenly he cursed himself. Previously, when Mungo had an iPhone, he and Stacey could always check where Mungo was on the Find My Friends app. Now, with the cheap phone he had bought him to replace it, to teach him a lesson for losing his iPhone, there was no app on which Mungo could be tracked. He hit Mungo Mob on his Favourites list. Held it tight to his ear. It was hard to hear the ringing above the roar of the crowd all around him. He heard it ringing once, twice, three times, four times, five times. Then his son’s voicemail.
‘Yeah, this is the right number for Mungo Brown. Leave a message unless your name’s Hugo, in which case go stick your head in a microwave and refry your already fried brains.’
He ended the call and was about to put the phone into his pocket when, through the din, he heard the ping of an incoming text.
Mungo, no doubt, he thought with relief surging through him. Mungo asking him where he was.
He looked at the display.
And froze.
26
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
In the Amex Control Room, Adrian Morris, on his feet, switching from CCTV monitor to monitor had, to his disbelief, watched Roy Grace run out with the suspect device and throw it into the deserted university playing field.
It was at least three hundred metres from the fortress-like outer wall of the stadium.
The EOD commander had requested only fifty, although with a preference for one hundred. He turned to the Match Commander. ‘What do you think, sir?’
‘I think Detective Superintendent Grace needs his head examined,’ Andy Kundert said.
Morris updated the EOD commander and sent him a new image, with the distance estimation, asking if he would be happy for the game to continue uninterrupted.
He replied in under a minute that he was.
27
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
Kipp Brown stared at the text, from a number he did not recognize, that had pinged in on his phone. He read it a second time, then a third.
Mr Brown, we have your son. We have also connected to the Amex Stadium CCTV network. If you call the police, or attempt to speak to any officer in the stadium, you will never see Mungo alive again. We will always know exactly where you are and who you talk to. We will see everything you do and hear everything you say. In the meantime, leave the stadium now, go home and we will contact you soon with our requirements for saving Mungo’s life.
28
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
It felt like a giant, unseen hand had reached out of nowhere and pinched tight all the air around him. Kipp Brown’s vision momentarily blurred, as if he had put on someone else’s glasses.
Images cascaded through his mind. Newspaper stories of abducted children, television appeals by distraught parents, televised Crimewatch reconstructions. Detectives standing in front of microphones, flashlights strobing across their grim expressions, reading out prepared statements.
This could not be happening to him.
Could not.
How could anyone have kidnapped the boy in full view of 30,000 people?
Completely oblivious now to anything that was happening in the game, he excused himself to the clients sitting beside him, told his two colleagues to look after everyone and hurried through the box and out of the door. Shaking and clammy, trying to think clearly what to do, he closed the door behind him and stood in the deserted, carpeted corridor.
How was he going to tell Stacey? She was still hurting and, like himself, probably would always be hurting from the death of their daughter, Kayleigh, four years ago. Ever since, they had both been overprotective of Mungo.
Shit, this could not be happening to them. Please God, no.
Only a few weeks ago he’d watched a documentary about a family whose daughter had been abducted, raped and murdered. The film had shown the distraught parents identifying her body in a mortuary.
Mungo might be irritating at times but he was, at heart, a good kid. Even if he didn’t show it all the time, Kipp loved his son to bits.
As did Stacey.
He loved her to bits, too, but she’d had a wall round her, since Kayleigh died, that most of the time he was just not able to penetrate. He tried, and they’d both been in therapy, but the grief had not gone away for either of them. He had thrown himself even harder into his work – and into gambling, in part, for sure, as an escape.
Although born in New Zealand, he had moved with his parents to England when he was eight. Growing up in a modest house in a Brighton suburb, Kipp had always cycled everywhere, to meet friends, to play football and tennis. His bike – and the freedom it gave him – had been a major part of his childhood and he’d tried to encourage his children to do the same. But all that had changed four years ago, on Kayleigh’s twelfth birthday. They had bought her a hoverboard. Excitedly testing it in a park near their home, she had shot out of control into the road and under the wheels of a lorry.
Perhaps it was because he’d been affected by the death of his older sister, or perhaps it was just the growing culture of today’s kids, but Mungo didn’t actually go out that often any more, preferring to stay at home in his room, Snapchatting and Instagramming and online gaming with his friends, just occasionally meeting up with them to make videos for his YouTube channel.
Kipp worried about the way Mungo seemed at times to be almost a recluse, and his lack of interest in playing any sports, other than at school. He’d had many discussions with Stacey about this. Yes, it was good to know Mungo was home, safe, but wasn’t overprotecting him just as dangerous? Stacey disagreed. Kipp had come across statistics that more children were abducted and murdered by strangers in 1936 than in 2016 and that it was the media that spread worry among parents. He had repeatedly tried to impress these figures on Stacey, who wasn’t having any of it. So far as she was concerned ever since Kayleigh’s death, beyond the gates of their home was a sewer teeming with all kinds of predators, just waiting for their son to emerge, unescorted.
What was he going to say to her now?
Could he have brought Mungo to a more secure place in the world than this stadium?
Scenes from television dramas, documentaries and news footage all blended together in his mind. The body of a small boy found in reeds beside a river. The body of a boy lying in sand below cliffs, shielded by a crime scene tent. The body of a boy discovered by a dog in remote woods.
He went down the two flights of the staircase and out into the near-deserted South concourse.
Through tear-blurred eyes, he looked at two police officers standing a few yards from him, desperate to speak to them but wary of the grim warning in the text.
He stared back down at his phone, his hands shaking, and tapped a reply. It took several goes before he hit the right letters and symbol.
Who are you?
It wouldn’t send. It was blocked.
Mungo taken from here i
n broad daylight? How? With all these people here?
He looked up and around the deserted area. Heard the sudden, ecstatic roar of the crowd. Had someone scored? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Nothing but Mungo.
Who was watching him and where? He glanced up at the stadium wall. At the row of dark windows, high beneath the finely curved roof. Was it someone behind one of them who had their son?
Thoughts were spinning through his mind like a roulette wheel that, instead of numbers, had options written in each slot between the frets. What did he say to his wife? What were his choices?
Tappity-tap. Phone Stacey.
Tappity-tap. Say nothing and wait for further instructions.
Tappity-tap. Go to a steward and say his son was missing.
Tappity-tap. Ignore the text instructions and inform the police.
He glanced at his watch and did a calculation. It was over two hours since he had seen him. So, where was he? Here in the grounds, still? Or taken away?
How scared was Mungo? Were they hurting him?
Never, in all his life, had Brown kowtowed to bullies or threats. He needed to think this through, fast, take some kind of decisive action.
How?
What?
They were going to send a ransom demand for money. How much? Everyone in this city thought he was as rich as Croesus, and with good reason – he had always given that impression, as PR for his business. One evening some years ago, at the Snowman Ball, after a particularly good financial year and far too much of a particularly good red wine, he’d stood up during the auction and pledged £100,000 to Chestnut Tree House, the children’s hospice that the event was in aid of. It made headlines in the Argus newspaper, and from that moment onwards, viewed as a golden couple, he and Stacey were approached for help by an endless succession of charities, as well as people with hard-luck stories – some chancers, some genuine. And, in truth, he found many requests hard to resist.
So many good, small local charities desperately in need of funds. Too many people whose lives were blighted because they were unable to afford the cost of medical treatment or hearing aids or travel to take their dying child to America to Disneyworld. He and Stacey had set up their own foundation and had since given away many hundreds of thousands of pounds. But during the past year, with his finances in meltdown, the donations had ceased. Only temporarily, he sincerely hoped. All the money he’d put into that fund he had taken back to keep the business solvent.