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

by David Videcette

  The man was in his seventies. His white hair and unkempt white beard contrasted with a dark blue dressing gown and matching slippers. His mouth was hanging open in shock. He looked utterly bewildered as to why these two Cockney coppers were trying to get into his South Yorkshire home. He said nothing.

  ‘Where’s Shaggy?’ asked Jake

  The man’s confusion got visibly worse as he stared back at Jake.

  ‘Me?’ said the man.

  ‘You got a mobile phone, Shaggy? Don’t move. Stay where you are, just tell us where it is,’ said Jake.

  Jake could hear Lenny attempt to pull the door to behind him and then fiddle with the broken lock.

  ‘Please do not be hurting me. Phone is on table in living room.’ The man began to look more scared now than confused. Jake walked past him and picked up the battered handset that was lying on the coffee table.

  Jake had brought with him both the mobile phone number and IMEI number of the handset that they’d identified from the reverse billings.

  He dialled *#06# on Shaggy’s mobile and brought up its IMEI number; he checked it against his notebook. Wrong one. This wasn’t the phone that had exchanged calls with Asif or Karim.

  Jake looked around the room. Orange carpet. Velour furniture. A mantelpiece full of photos of children slowly growing up, going to college and graduating from university.

  This was all wrong.

  He felt it in his gut. This was the wrong place. This was the wrong bloke. It was too late to undo this mess. This sometimes happened. A bit of crappy information added to a bit of the wrong attitude, multiplied by a hangover, equalled a fucking shambles.

  ‘Always press ahead when you end up in this situation,’ Jake heard the voice in his head say. The bad guys or even the good guys with the wrong attitude don’t actually know you’ve got it wrong.

  ‘Come in and sit down, Shaggy, please,’ said Jake in his best calming voice.

  ‘What is it about?’ Shaggy asked, the stress on his face clearly visible.

  ‘We are looking for a man called Shaggy that made some phone calls. We thought that might be you. Do you know anyone in Leeds?’ said Jake.

  ‘No. I am not going out much these days, isn’t it? My wife, she is dead and my children work down there in the London banking. I don’t go out much. I don’t see many people,’ Shaggy said, his face crumbling.

  Jake decided that they needed to beat a hasty retreat. He fished out the remaining cash he had left in his pocket from the previous night out on the tiles… £200.

  ‘Thanks, Shaggy. Get your door repaired, mate. Take care,’ Jake said, as he handed over the big wad of notes to the bemused old man.

  Lenny said nothing. Jake walked out of the door and Len followed his lead, waving the remote-control key fob at the car to unlock it from behind his boss. Jake got in the passenger side. Lenny climbed into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Drive, you useless tosser!’ shouted Jake, laughing and wincing all at the same time – appalled by their morning’s antics.

  Lenny started the car and pulled away in a hurry.

  81

  Wednesday

  24 August 2005

  1504 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  After lunch in Sheffield, Lenny and Jake returned to the office in Bradford. They’d both agreed not to mention to anyone that they’d even been to South Yorkshire; it had never happened.

  Amersham Computers had called whilst Jake had been kicking an innocent old man’s door down. The supercomputer was ready. Big Simon had brought their haul of techno goodies back to the office and set it all up. It had taken him hours to get all the software and data loaded onto it.

  Jake walked into the office to hear a ‘Fucking hell!’ from Big Simon, followed by a long, slow whistle through his teeth.

  ‘Jake! It’s not crashed! It’s actually fucking working!’

  Jake flew over to look at the new supercomputer’s screen. On it, the full phone data was listed in glorious working order.

  ‘Christ, and this is just the start?’ Big Simon asked. ‘How do we even know what they were thinking? What their state of mind was when they made these communications?’

  ‘Si, we need to treat this investigation like any other organised crime. Forget the scale of it. Forget the fact it was terrorism. These are the issues that everyone’s been getting bogged down by. We need to look at it like they were planning a bank robbery. We need to take all emotion out of it. That way we can find out how they did it and who helped them,’ said Jake.

  ‘I know, I know. We need to get back to basics. What did old Roger from CID used to say back in the good old days? I don’t want the people the suspect speaks to most. I want the people he speaks to the least. The things they do the least are the things that are the most interesting.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, forget the girlfriend he’s texting goodnight to every night,’ laughed Jake, ‘although those are by far and away the best texts…’

  Simon smirked. ‘No! We need the one number the criminal speaks to over the course of a series of months, then goes silent on. D’you remember?’ Simon was scrolling through the data now. ‘Roger used to say look for the one final, rogue message in the run-up to the robbery. That proves they’ve finalised something, broken off communications, and then gone back to double-check the plan. That’s what we’re looking for.’

  Thursday

  25 August 2015

  1750 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Jake and Simon had spent most of the day playing with their supercomputer, getting to grips with the system, uploading more data and creating pivot tables. Jake was cheered by their progress.

  Now the office was almost dead. There was no talking or banter; just the whirr of computer fans and the tappety-tap-tap of computer keys as the MIR staff input information into the HOLMES system. The rest of the troops were out chasing where loaves were made and when they’d been shipped to here, there, Timbuktu or the bomb factory. Hours wasted digging up information that wasn’t going to solve anything, thought Jake. Then again, kicking in some innocent bloke’s door hadn’t solved much either, and besides, Jake didn’t think he could afford to do that every day.

  Jake looked at his computer screen. He had to find some focus. He pulled up Karim Rahman’s statement again:

  On top of my brother’s wardrobe, I found a piece of paper and a mobile phone. The paper had two mobile phone numbers on it, one against the name Shaggy and one against the name Shahid. When I looked in the handset’s call log, both the Shaggy and Shahid numbers had previously been called from the phone.

  I called the Shahid number. A man answered. He had a West Yorkshire accent. He said that he knew my brother from the mosque, but I’d never heard of the mosque he talked about. Then the man terminated the call…’

  Jake went over to Simon. He gave him Shahid’s number. ‘Can you give that one a run through the new system please, Simon? HOLMES tells me that we’ve done fuck all with it so far.’

  ‘Leave it with me, Jake.’

  Nothing had been done on it at all. Jake was shocked. He’d been forced to spend weeks investigating rice packets when things like this number hadn’t even been properly scrutinised.

  Jake watched Simon use the fancy fingerprint scanner to log on to the new supercomputer and access the 600,000 individual pieces of data. The big man smiled as his screen lit up. He was in his element.

  Simon typed the last six digits of Shahid’s phone number into the find field and hit the return key. i2 displayed things in a different way to Excel. It was more of a visual tool. The supercomputer took a few moments then came up with a hit. Jake looked at the time and date of the call. It was the phone call Karim had made looking for his missing brother. The one he’d talked about in his statement. Jake sighed.

>   Big Simon manipulated some windows and looked in more detail at the results that the computer had found.

  ‘There are actually seven matches for this number…’ Simon beamed.

  ‘Seven?’ Jake said loudly. On the other side of the office, two MIR staff had stopped tapping their keys and were looking directly at him, waiting to hear what was coming next.

  ‘That’s an interesting number. When was the first call?’ he asked, much more quietly this time.

  Jake watched as Simon manipulated the data. It was like he was manipulating time. Whizzing downwards, backwards from 26 August 2005, Jake was being allowed to look back before the fifty-two victims and four bombers has died. The computer stopped. It had completed its task. Jake looked at the date of the call that had been highlighted.

  08/04/2005.

  ‘Nearly three months before the bombings, Jake. Call-pattern spread is very narrow. They certainly ain’t best mates,’ Simon said as he continued to play with the computer. ‘The call was made to Shahid. From Wasim. From Wasim’s personal handset.’

  ‘What the fuck? That can’t be right? Made from Wasim to Shahid? Not Asif?’

  Simon tapped away excitedly on the keyboard. ‘That’s correct. First two contacts are Wasim. Then the next five are Asif.’

  ‘OK. Let’s give those calls some context – what was going on around that time?’ asked Jake.

  Jake checked Wasim’s travel dates. Wasim had arrived back from Pakistan on Tuesday, 8 February 2005. Jake knew that Wasim had been in contact with an unidentified clandestine contact in Pakistan on Sunday, 10 April. The person in Pakistan had been using phone kiosks to call Wasim. The calls stopped at 0900 hours on Thursday, 7 July 2005. The day of the bombings. The caller clearly knew what was going to happen and had stopped trying to make contact.

  Lenny walked into the office with two cups of tea. He sat down next to Jake and pushed a chipped white mug toward him.

  ‘Lenny, when did Wasim first purchase any hydrogen peroxide? What date?’ asked Jake.

  Lenny fished out a notebook from his pocket and fumbled around with it for a few moments before finding the information he needed.

  ‘Thursday, 31 March 2005 was the first purchase, boss. Wasim purchased five litres that day,’ replied Lenny.

  ‘That’s all a bit coincidental,’ Jake murmured as he looked upwards at the ceiling, mulling it all over.

  ‘What’s coincidental?’ asked Lenny.

  ‘You know the other number we were looking at? The other one that was with the Shaggy one?’

  ‘The Shahid one?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, we just searched for it in the supercomputer on the off chance. Turns out it’s been in contact several times, not just with Asif – but with Wasim too,’ said Jake.

  ‘That’s interesting. How come that’s not been identified already?’ asked Lenny, surprised.

  ‘See, this is exactly what I’ve been saying all along with this shit, Lenny! None of these personal phone billings have been entered into HOLMES properly. The analysts have been concentrating solely on the operational handsets, but there’s been bleed over from the bombers’ activities onto their personal phones. No one’s had the full picture of what they’ve been up to. Nothing important seems to have been actioned unless it’s related to a fucking rice packet! Who knows what’s actually been done and what hasn’t?

  ‘Anyway, it’s important because of the timings of the calls. Wasim called Shahid on 8 April. That’s a week after he made that first hydrogen peroxide purchase. Moreover, that’s just two days before those Pakistan phone-kiosk calls start. Wasim is in full operational attack mode. Everything Wasim is doing at that point is working toward the end goal. To my mind, Shahid is possibly involved.’ Jake looked Lenny straight in the eye to gauge his response.

  ‘I’m with you, Jake. I never argue with your theories, I like them,’ winked Lenny.

  ‘Take Shahid’s phone number, Len. Run it through West Yorkshire’s intelligence and crime-information systems for me. Find out what they know about him. I’m going to speak to the guys at the Security Service,’ said Jake.

  82

  Thursday

  25 August 2005

  2000 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Jake was alone in the office.

  The walls were made of sound-deadening blue cloth, which gave the place a sleepy sort of silence. Everyone had gone home or back to their hotels; it wasn’t unusual for him to be here on his own. Jake liked the peace at this time; he had time to think.

  He was just getting ready to leave Dudley Hill when he saw Claire’s number flash up on the small screen of his Nokia. He’d left a message earlier for her to call him back. Security Service employees were not allowed to take their mobile phones into their actual office suites at Thames House. They had to be turned off before entering and placed in metal cabinets outside. They were advised to turn them off even before they got near their building, but not everyone did. The mobile phone mast on the roof meant that foreign security services could potentially track and target those handsets which ‘pinged’ on the mast on a daily basis, because it was very likely that the people who owned them worked in the building directly below.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous – how are you?’ he asked Claire as he picked up her call. He worried for a split second that he sounded far too enthusiastic to hear from her.

  ‘Not too bad. Things are pretty grim this end. We’re under a lot of pressure to deliver stuff that we either don’t know or had forgotten that we knew. What about you?’

  ‘Working hard. Thinking hard. Drinking hard. There’s not a lot else to me at the moment. The pub is the only place I can escape this shit.’

  ‘I wish we had the drinking time down here, Jake, honestly I do. Think yourself lucky.’ Claire sounded tired.

  ‘Well, you could always pop up here and I could show you the best that Leeds has to offer.’

  ‘Ha. I know you’re the best Leeds has to offer, Jake. And trust me, soon as I can get away, you can show me. Is that what you’ve called me for?’

  ‘I feel bad now. No, that wasn’t why I left a message. I need a favour,’ he said.

  ‘I’m all out of favours, Jake. I’ve only just got out of the last mess you put me in. The audit trail highlighted that I’d looked at the phone records for Sullivan House. I had to come up with a hell of a story to sort that out for you. If this is Leeds stuff you’re going to have to put it through your normal channel. Speak to your official contact. I can’t help you.’

  ‘You know that takes ages and I’m never confident that I’m being told the truth. You lot know loads that you’re not telling us.’

  ‘It’s arse-covering basically, Jake. Be persuasive. Use your charm. Ask them why they think Wasim moved address five times in 2004. I can’t keep doing this stuff for you. Sorry. Look, I’ve got some holiday booked; maybe we can grab some time away together? Do you fancy a trip down to Cornwall, to the old house?’

  Jake had been to Travannon House twice before. It was a beautiful old place overlooking a sheltered cove near St Austell. He was envious of the incredible scenery and much of Claire’s life growing up there. He jumped at the chance. ‘That would be great. When are you off?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll text the dates to you later. I’ve gotta go. Miss you,’ she said as she put the phone down.

  The office returned to silence. Dusk was beginning to fall outside. The staplers and pen pots were casting shapes on the tabletops as the sun made its retreat.

  Jake put his elbows on the desk and let his head fall forward onto his hands. He closed his eyes. He imagined himself lying sprawled on a blanket on a Cornish beach, the breeze buffing his cheeks, as he breathed in hazy lungfuls of sea air flavoured with a mixture of clay and gorse bush.

  He didn’t want what he had right now. This life – he w
anted to spend time away with Claire, or see his girls. Wasim was with him every moment, especially in the small hours. He was drinking too much. He knew that. It was almost as if he couldn’t function without it. The night before last, his kids hadn’t wanted to talk to him on the phone when he’d called to say goodnight. Then he’d burst into tears brushing his teeth this morning. He didn’t really know why.

  Just a couple of drinks tonight. No food. Early night.

  A break would do him good.

  83

  Friday

  26 August 2005

  1008 hours

  Longthorne Oak Hotel, central Leeds, West Yorkshire

  Jake had awoken that morning to a white expanse of hotel-room ceiling, with what looked like a new light fitting in the middle of it. He’d lain in bed for ages, wondering why his light had been changed during the night.

  As he’d looked down, he realised that ‘just a couple’ of drinks must have turned into many more. He vaguely remembered talking to a group of girls at a bar who’d then dragged him to a club. He couldn’t even remember which club it was. The attractive, twenty-something brunette with whom he was in bed must have been one of them, surely?

  An hour later, he’d said his goodbyes and made his way back to his own room, wearing the previous night’s clothes.

  ‘This has got to stop, Jake. We can’t carry on like this. You’re going to kill yourself, or catch something nasty,’ he said to himself as he looked at his reflection in the lift mirror.

  Time for a shower, fresh clothes and then a dash to get to work.

  Jake’s team worked at Dudley Hill from the Monday of one week through to the Friday of the following week, without a break. That made a shift of twelve days on the trot. They had two days off with their family, or whatever or whomever they had in their lives, then they had to be back at Dudley Hill at 0900 hours the following Monday.

  That meant just sixty-five hours’ break every two weeks. Jake couldn’t comprehend how anyone had enough time to conduct anything vaguely approaching a normal lifestyle or relationship. To him it seemed an impossible task, given the distance they were away from home.