‘You’re interrogating me, Zarshad? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? I ask you the questions. Why are you so interested in what I’m doing here? Don’t take the fucking piss because you’ve bought me a pint.’
‘Yeah, yeah, you’re the boss,’ said Zarshad. ‘OK. You got me. I saw you through the window and wondered what you were up to, if you were working? I’m doing fuck all at the moment. Supplying the odd motor, nothing more.’
The smile broke again on Zarshad’s face and his eyes followed. Jake could tell he spoke the truth. The skin between his eyebrows and his upper eyelid moved. He knew it was almost nigh on impossible to contract the muscle that ringed the eye, unless in a genuine smile.
Jake picked up the pint Zarshad had got him and took a swig. ‘Cheers, mate.’
Jake didn’t answer questions from snouts – that way led to disaster.
No, he was the one who did the questioning.
69
Friday
19 August 2005
1730 hours
The Trafalgar, King’s Road, Chelsea
A used-car trader of Pakistani heritage, Zarshad had grown up on a Chelsea council estate living alongside extreme wealth. It stared him in the face and the draw was strong. He wanted what the rich had too.
So he took it.
Normally it was their cars parked in the street which he rung – a process of giving a stolen vehicle the identity of another vehicle so that it could be sold. Sometimes Zarshad would take the rich men’s daughters. He was a good-looking lad in his early thirties with the gift of the gab. He dabbled a bit in drugs and a certain type of rich chick was attracted to him on a short-term basis.
When Jake had arrested him in possession of a stolen car, Zarshad had expressed an interest in helping out with the huge investigation he’d been running at the time, but only in exchange for Jake helping him get off the charge, of course. That’s how those relationships started. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
In the end, Zarshad had got a police caution instead of going to court. Jake liked him. He was an honest criminal; he didn’t dress himself up as anything else.
‘What you up to then, Zarsh? What’s going on in your life?’ asked Jake.
‘Same old stuff, really, mate. I’ve not been setting the world alight with anything. I’m a bit down on my luck. Girlfriend fucked off to Marbella and didn’t come back a few months ago. Met an ex of hers out there, I think. She says they have a “history” that can’t be thrown away. Shame. I liked her. But look at me… I’m just a mug with fuck all who lives in a one-bedroomed flat, ain’t I? Hardly marriage material?’
‘What’s the ex got that you haven’t got then – two or three bedrooms more? A bigger cock?’ chuckled Jake.
Zarshad smiled.
‘I don’t fucking know. Can’t get any sense out of her over the phone. She says that the sex was the best she’d ever had with me! Said she loved me. Said she wanted to be with me. Then it all changes overnight. No reason why. She can say what she likes though, can’t she? Just words. Actions speak louder than words, don’t they, mate?’
Zarshad downed the remaining three quarters of his pint in one go.
‘Fuck it, let’s have another one. Fancy a shot as well, Jake?’
Jake looked at the dregs in the pint glass sat on the table. He really should leave, he thought. Shouldn’t be here with a snout drinking. But where was he going to go? To another pub? Back home? Zarshad was what – the lesser of two evils? Better than being on his own.
‘Why not? Go for it. I’ll get the next one,’ said Jake, picking up his pint and downing the remainder in solidarity with Zarshad.
They both had absent girlfriends who said one thing and did something else. Why not drown their sorrows together?
70
Friday
19 August 2005
1845 hours
The Trafalgar, King’s Road, Chelsea
As the number of pint and shot glasses on the table grew, the pub got busier and noisier. Jake’s head was beginning to feel a bit fuzzy. He looked down at his watch. They’d been drinking and talking about the problem they both had in common – women – for nearly two hours.
Zarshad set two fresh pints down on the table among the pile of empty glasses, before returning to the bar to collect two shot glasses of something strong, dark coloured and medicinal smelling. He passed one to Jake.
Jake held it aloft and said, ‘To the absent and the dead. Gone but never forgotten. To family!’
‘They certainly need me to drink to them!’ toasted Zarshad in agreement. He threw back the glass, slamming the liquid to the back of his throat.
‘I’ve never heard you talk about your parents, Zarshad. They alive?’
‘My mum passed away when I was young. My dad’s alive, I think – I haven’t seen him in ten years.’
‘Wow. Why’s that?’
‘My fucking father and bloody Tablighi Jamaat. He’s very religious. He doesn’t agree with my lifestyle – the drinking, the women, the drugs. But he’s the reason I am the way I am. He spent his life ramming Islam down all of our throats. He made me learn the Quran, verse by verse, from a baby. Fucking years and years of it there was. I think the first words I said were out the Holy Book. He wanted me to follow a particularly strict sect of Islam. Then when I was eighteen, he organised a marriage to my cousin… I wouldn’t have minded too much but she was a fat ugly bitch!
‘I caused a major family upset when I refused to follow him down the same religious path and marry her. It’s all about money. Her brother was supposed to marry my sister. My father was getting a small fortune for her in dowry money and was paying fuck all for me marrying the ugly bitch. All this religion and it was just a frigging business agreement. The business just happened to be family.
‘I told him and his religion to go fuck themselves. That’s why I choose to live my hedonistic lifestyle, I suppose. I’m still rebelling.’
Zarshad picked up his pint and held it up for another toast. He looked across at Jake and nodded at him to do the same. Jake complied.
‘And prepare against them whatever you are able, of power and of steeds of war, by which you may terrify the enemy,’ Zarshad said.
Jake looked at him confused but swigged from his pint all the same.
Zarshad explained, ‘Chapter 8:60, from the Quran, or part of it. I’m at war with my bloody father and this beer is my power over him who is the enemy.’
Jake suddenly had Wasim’s video in his head. He could see the cartoon clock showing 8.50 a.m. The bombs had started to go off at 0850 hours.
‘What does Chapter 8:50 say, Zarshad?’
Zarshad looked at the ceiling and scrunched up his face, willing himself to remember.
‘And if you could but see when the angels take the souls of those who disbelieved… They are striking their faces and their backs and saying, “Taste the punishment of the Burning Fire”!’
Zarshad smiled triumphantly. He poured the fresh pint down his throat in reward.
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ said Jake.
‘What? Jesus? He’s in the Quran too?’
‘It was 8.50 a.m. That time. The time of the attacks was symbolic,’ said Jake.
71
Friday
19 August 2005
1930 hours
The Trafalgar, King’s Road, Chelsea
‘What?’ asked Zarshad.
Jake wasn’t listening. His mind was racing at a million miles an hour.
People often saw investigations like building a jigsaw puzzle – collecting all the pieces and then assembling them in the right way by copying the picture on the box. It was a method even a child could do. You could probably even teach a chimpanzee to do it, thought Jake.
Find all four corners, then find all the straight edges. B
uild the outside of the puzzle, getting an idea of how big it was. Fill in the centre using the image on the box with all the pieces that you have left.
The puzzle had to fit together. You knew it would.
There were a number of problems with the puzzle method. Firstly it assumed that you already had all the pieces needed to complete it. Then it assumed you had a good idea what the picture was supposed to look like when it was finished.
It worked reasonably well with simple crimes like a man knifing his partner to death in their kitchen in a row over the dinner. This was the type of crime where you already knew who your victim was, where the crime took place, could prove what the murder weapon was and you had a prime suspect. Easy. You had all the pieces. An idiot could prosecute that offender. You just had to put the pieces together in the right way, using the set method, and prove a guilty mind.
What if you had no idea what the picture was? Had no idea how many pieces of the puzzle there were? What if some of the pieces were missing? Or someone was deliberately giving you the wrong puzzle and the wrong picture?
Jake didn’t use the puzzle method. Instead he stored pieces of information like pennies. Each penny lived in the arcade of his brain. He would place each coin into a specific slot machine in his head, the type you’d play on the seafront pier as a child with your mum and dad. Some called them ‘sliders’ or ‘penny pushers’. They were also known as ‘shovers’ or ‘coin cascades’. But Jake knew them as penny-falls machines.
They were the ones you dropped the pennies into, one after the other. They built up the coins in mounds and piles. Some pennies would fall on top of each other, just sit there and be useless, but some would back up and form a little chain. When Jake had enough pennies in the right places, eventually a quantity would fall out in an avalanche. They’d fill the holder by his feet and make him a winner.
In Jake’s eureka moments, the penny would drop into the right slot and all of a sudden the coins would fall into place. Lots of things that never made sense or he’d thought meant nothing all came together and screamed the same message at him in that one instant. And the solution to the case came crashing out.
Wasim had made his video in Pakistan, months before the attacks, explaining the reasons he would blow himself up and the reasons for martyring himself. That was a penny-falls machine in Jake’s head. One that had never paid out. It had lots of pennies in it all piled up, waiting to be unlocked.
One of the pennies in the machine was something that Wasim had said on the video.
Jake played the footage back in his head. Wasim was sitting there in front of the red and cream fabric backdrop saying, ‘We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation!’
Another penny in that machine was the animated clock showing the time of the explosions, a big clock showing 0850 hours. The same time that the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on 9/11.
Eight fifty. Chapter 8:50.
Jake dropped another penny in that machine; the penny that Zarshad had just given him about what Chapter 8:50 of the Quran said: ‘Taste the punishment of the burning fire.’
‘What are you on about? Time of what attacks?’ Zarshad interrupted Jake’s chain of thought.
‘I’m working on the London bombings. I’m on the Anti-Terrorist Branch now.’ Jake suddenly realised that he was getting into drunken-confession territory with a snout. The alcohol was getting to him like a truth serum; he was starting to say what was in his head without thinking.
‘Wow – Charlie Big Potatoes you are now, Jake! Fuckers the people that did that!’ Zarshad burped at the end of the sentence and smiled.
At least I’m not the only inebriated customer, thought Jake to himself.
‘They blew themselves up at 8.50 a.m.’ Jake picked up his pint and swigged a mouthful of the dregs. He held the glass against his lips, staring dead ahead. Straight through Zarshad. There was something nagging at the back of his mind, but the alcohol was now seriously inhibiting his powers of concentration.
The timings of the attacks had been planned seven or eight months before they were carried out. Others must have known the meaning of the timings, surely? That’s why there was a huge animated clock in the video making a big point of the 8.50 a.m. time. The attacks had been planned with other people. This wasn’t just four loners. Someone was saying, ‘This has meaning. We know the significance of it.’
The bomb factory. It had been staged to make it look like it was just the four of them involved, but Jake had felt in his gut all along that this was wrong. There were others involved; maybe lots of them. The guys who tried to do the same on 21 July. It was a sign. It had a symbolic meaning. He needed to speak to Claire. There were more than just a few kids up in Yorkshire involved in this.
Jake was still holding his glass up to his lips, staring into space.
‘Jake, what’s wrong with you? Are you as drunk as I am? Snap out of it, it’s your round. Go get the drinks.’ Zarshad held up his empty glass.
‘OK.’ Jake downed the rest of his lager and stood up. He walked toward the bar, deep in thought. The same petite barmaid was still there, offering service with a smile. Jake didn’t bother trying to conceal his interest in her breasts this time. He looked straight down at them. There was a crucifix on a chain around her neck; it nestled in her cleavage.
Jake ordered two pints and then walked back to where Zarshad was sat.
‘The crucifix. A cross. The cross as the symbol of Christ,’ Jake said as he plonked the beers down onto the table and stared out of the window again.
There was a sign on the wall opposite the pub. It read ‘King’s Road’.
‘King’s Cross – they separated at King’s Cross. They went north, south, east and west. In the shape of a cross from fucking King’s Cross! It’s all symbolic!’ Jake stood up suddenly and walked toward the door.
‘For fuck’s sake, Jake, where are you going? Stop being weird. You sound like my father. He’d tell ya there are no Christians left in England; all atheists – no one goes to church any more. That’s why he’d say it doesn’t count if this country is attacked. We’re all fair game. He’d say it’s not against his holy book to attack atheists…’
Jake wasn’t listening. Zarshad’s voice faded as he walked out of the door, his mind a mess. Fuzzy with drink, pennies, arcade machines and Wasim laughing at him. He stumbled into the street and waved at Zarshad as he walked past the window. He needed to be alone. He had thinking to do. The beer was no good for thinking. It was no good for anything except forgetting.
72
Saturday
20 August 2005
1003 hours
The flat above the sari shop, Whitechapel, East End of London
Jake awoke with a start. The room was light. The flimsy floral curtains did nothing to keep the sun out. His grandmother had been a poor sleeper her whole life, awake most of the time it seemed. He could turn up at any time of the day or night and she’d welcome him in. He wondered if she’d ever slept. Curtains that kept out the sun were not high on her agenda.
He wondered what had woken him. Then he heard it – there was a loud banging at his front door.
‘Shit – what now?’ he said to himself as he jumped out of bed.
He scoured the bedside table for his phone. It was nowhere to be seen. Where was it? What time was it? Had something happened? Another bomb?
The banging was getting louder. He walked down the hallway, opened the front door and was startled to see the twenty-year-old daughter of the sari-shop owner standing there looking at him. Jake was wearing just his boxer shorts and an embarrassed smile. She looked his semi-naked body up and down and smirked.
She was short, five feet two, with long dark hair and amazing eyes. Jake had seen her a few times but didn’t know her name. She was wearing an orange sari draped partially over an exposed midriff.
‘Clearly.’ She smiled broadly and her eyes sparkled.
‘How can I help?’ he asked, standing there self-consciously in his boxers and wanting to bring the conversation to an end quickly.
‘It’s your cat. She’s been crying at your window for the past two hours. She knows you’re in because she can hear you snoring. We can all hear you bloody snoring. It’s like a foghorn downstairs in the shop. Maybe you should let her in and feed her?’
‘Yep. Sorry.’
The young girl turned and walked down the stairs. She stopped on the half-landing below and paused, looking back up at Jake with a big smile.
‘We all miss your grandmother. She was sweet, if a little old-fashioned. It’s great to see you taking on the flat and not selling it. We know you’re away a lot. We look after Edwina when you’re not here, you know.’
Jake was comforted by her comments. ‘Thank you. I miss my grandmother too. Very much. I really appreciate you looking after Ted. My job is a nightmare right now.’
The girl nodded and smiled at him as she continued her walk down the stairs and back to the shop.
Jake went to the kitchen. Ted was indeed yowling at the window to come in. He slid the sash window up and she jumped off the corrugated iron roof and onto the lino at his feet. She seemed really pleased to see him, rubbing herself all around his bare legs and purring loudly.
‘Aww hello, Ted. Long time no see, babes. You look well. I can’t say I’m surprised – I’d look well if the girl from downstairs was taking care of me regularly too.’
Jake stroked her soft black fur. She felt clean and silky. He reached into the cupboard and pulled out a tin of pilchard cat food, the only edible item in the entire kitchen.
He watched her scoff down the entire bowl. She was happy and well rested for once.
THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. Page 20