Queen’s market was a seventies monstrosity; a covered area where local traders held a daily market selling meat, fish, leather goods and colourful head scarves. The council was threatening to close it down, but the locals were fighting against it.
The council said that no one paid their rent or rates there. They wanted redevelopment – luxury flats and a smaller market. The place was rife with poverty. There was already talk of West Ham relocating to the Olympic Stadium after the London 2012 games.
The 1966 Bobby Moore from the end of the road wouldn’t recognise this place. In his heyday it had been full of Jewish traders from the East End selling vegetables and clothes. Today all the locals emanated from the Indian subcontinent and parts of Africa.
The place was packed with people shouting, bartering and negotiating. Jake caught a few snatched words of Urdu.
He was eternally grateful to Kate for doing the work on the pay-as-you-go phone used to hire the van. He was finding it hard to get her out of his mind.
Jake had made a quiet visit to the Yard on his return to London to look up what intelligence the police held on Mohammed Biaj. There wasn’t much; clearly the Security Service were not sharing what they had. Jake had been able to print out a photo of Biaj which he now sat looking at. He’d sellotaped it to the inside of the newspaper that he held in front of him at the table and pretended to be engrossed in reading it. The photo just looked like part of the paper at first glance, an old covert surveillance trick, but it made it much easier to compare the faces of passers-by to the face of the person you were hunting for.
Biaj was known to use the maze of the market for his clandestine meetings. There was no CCTV. The place was described as hostile for police-surveillance purposes. Jake could see why. It was almost impossible if you were white, like most police surveillance teams were, to blend in with the predominantly black and Asian locals. That was why Jake had decided upon using the café for some cover.
Arabic music spilled out across the stalls from the centre of the market. The smell of raw meat and fish filled his nose when the foul-tasting coffee wasn’t near. Women wore black burkas or colourful saris, with the men in jeans of yellow, red and blue, or more traditional Islamic formal dress.
After about an hour, Jake spotted the swarthy Iraqi features of Biaj from the photo. It was the unusual nose – which was too small for his face – that gave him away. He was dressed in white shalwar kameez; loose trousers that were narrow at the ankle, with a long mandarin-collared tunic on his top half. He wore a crocheted skullcap and had a dense black beard, with a clear paunch underneath his shirt. Jake watched him as he walked past, deep in conversation with two much younger Asian men.
Jake got up and shadowed them as they left the market, but peeled off toward his car as the three men parted and went their separate ways to their own vehicles.
109
Saturday
8 October 2005
1310 hours
Blackwall tunnel, London
Biaj was three cars in front of Jake. The traffic was stop and start.
The Blackwall tunnel was ahead; three lanes of solid traffic. All around him the sun bounced off the cars’ metal roofs and glared back from windscreens.
The afternoon’s traffic fumes clogged Jake’s nose. The month had been unseasonably dry and warm. He pressed the button on the door to close the window and keep the fumes out. A man in a Volkswagen next to him was bobbing up and down in his seat to the beat of Britney’s ‘Toxic’.
The song reminded Jake of his two girls. He remembered how they’d been glued to the live stage show on MTV. For this, the throbbing opening number, Britney had entered dressed in a black catsuit, atop a cartoonish-looking ‘Toxic’ bus. Jake shuddered at the sudden realisation of how close to home it all was.
Jake’s mind wandered to Claire as he sat there in the traffic. Britney’s lyrics stuck in his head. Was Claire toxic? Did she love him? Did he love her? Kate’s caution about Claire being a stranger to the truth wouldn’t leave him alone.
The traffic started to move in front of him. Biaj observed the rules of the road. He stayed in one lane and maintained a steady pace.
He was easy to follow; surprisingly easy in fact. Some people weren’t. They would drive really slowly, stop and start or travel really, really fast and jump red lights. Those sorts of methods quickly shook off any car following them. Classic anti-surveillance tactics. Jake had expected Biaj to use exactly those methods; instead he drove normally. They entered the down ramp to the southbound tunnel ahead. Jake’s ears felt the pressure change as they went under the Thames.
The southbound bore of the tunnel was straighter than the northbound and newer by some seventy years. Jake was always fascinated by the tunnel’s history. The northbound tunnel had been in use by horses and carts during Queen Victoria’s reign, which meant that it had to be curved, rather than straight, simply because the horses would bolt if they saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
The traffic was fighting and vying for any tiny piece of space on the road to get into the entrance of the tunnel, creating a real bottleneck of traffic. This bottle had a leak though, and the cars sprayed out the other end into the sunlight of south London. The Millennium Dome’s huge white expanse to the left watched as more than a hundred thousand vehicles a day flowed past.
This part of London was legendary for all the wrong reasons. Behind the Dome was a place called Shooter’s Hill. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been one of the most notorious places in England for highway robbery. The infamous Dick Turpin robbed the rich atop of it.
What was Biaj doing over here, Jake wondered. His small black Toyota car was no Black Bess. He wasn’t going to outrun anyone.
Jake was now four cars back, as the dual carriageway meandered its way up the hill. Biaj indicated and took the Blackheath slip road. A vast, open heath lay ahead at the top of Greenwich Park. It was a mile across, with no buildings, no trees, nothing. Just flat grass and a single bloody tea hut serving snacks and drinks.
Jake cursed. Blackheath Tea Hut was every surveillance officer’s nightmare.
110
Saturday
8 October 2005
1358 hours
Blackwall tunnel, London
The tea hut had been there in one form or another since the reign of Charles II in the seventeenth century. A meeting point and watering hole for weary travellers before they braved going up and over the lawless Shooter’s Hill, it was a last chance for fortification before the possibility of coming face to face with Dick Turpin.
At the little green wooden shack, drivers could park up, grab a cuppa and plot their next scheme. Bad guys loved the place because they could see for miles around and determine if they were being watched.
Unlike pretty much every other part of London, Blackheath had remained unchanged. Time had stood still for hundreds of years here. All the modern highwaymen knew it. The upper echelons of criminal empires staged meets near to the tea hut and had done ever since Jake had been in the police. People who didn’t want to be seen together, didn’t want to be knowingly associated with one another, they would just happen to be at the Blackheath Tea Hut at the same time. ‘So what, Your Honour? Everyone knows the tea hut. It was just a coincidence they were there at the same time,’ you’d often hear in the courtroom.
Surveillance teams couldn’t stop close enough unnoticed to see who was doing what. The bad guys knew it and they’d have someone in a car as a lookout. If an unfamiliar vehicle stopped or if there was someone with binoculars looking at the tea hut, then the meet didn’t take place; they were being watched.
Biaj was heading directly for it on the middle of the heath. He was slowing down. He was stopping at the tea hut. This was surreal. This wasn’t right. Jake drove on. He couldn’t pull up – he’d be clocked straightaway.
It was half a mile up the road
before he could safely turn around. He drove back in the direction that he’d come. The heath was like a vast African plain, minus the elephants and giraffes. There were no trees. Nothing. Just open grasslands.
As he neared the little green wooden shack, he saw Biaj, who was out of his car by now and standing on a mound of mud. He was shouting at a man in an expensive-looking, designer suit who was getting out of a smart new Jaguar.
A red jaguar. Unusual colour for the new XF, thought Jake. It looked flash.
People who were going to buy an XF didn’t usually want to be flash, because it wasn’t that sort of car, thought Jake. It was a more understated, opulent type of vehicle. More popular in silver.
The colour was all wrong. This one was bright red, with twin exhausts and big fat wheels.
Too red.
It was in-your-face, look-at-me red. Like the devil. Like the blood that comes from an open wound.
Jake had seen one like it before. Where? Think, Jake!
The driver of the red Jaguar, the man in the designer suit, was now chatting away to Biaj. Jake slowed down to 30 mph. The man in the suit had his back to him. The way he stood, his hair, long on top and dark, but with expensive-looking highlights in it, his pale skin, the way he moved his arm, the suit. It all looked familiar. He was drinking tea; he had his back to the road.
‘Turn, you bastard, turn!’ cursed Jake. He slowed the car down further, just as much as he thought he could get away with without being spotted.
The man turned his head slightly to the right just as Jake passed. A split second. Jake had got lucky. He raced through the archives of his mind, trying to pinpoint where he’d seen that profile and vehicle together.
No. It couldn’t be, could it?
The same face he’d seen that night they’d got drunk on cocktails. The same face he’d seen dropping Claire off after work, the last time they’d actually made it to Tiger Tiger.
It was Claire’s boss.
111
Saturday
8 October 2005
1442 hours
Blackheath Tea Hut, Blackheath, south-east London
Jake almost drove the car into the bollards up ahead; his mind was reeling. What was going on here? Kate had suggested Biaj was a source for the intelligence agencies and here he was with a member of the Security Service, Claire’s boss.
Lawrence Congerton-Jones.
Jake suddenly thought back to some of the things Claire had said and done. Kate had been adamant that Claire was not an analyst and that she did something out of the office. Was she really a field agent? Jake didn’t think so. She wasn’t surveillance aware and she wasn’t practically minded. She wasn’t even clued-up enough about security to have a decent lock on her front door. The one thing she was good at, was dealing with people.
Maybe she was an informant handler?
Claire had lied to him. Why? Whose side was she on?
When Jake had told her about the explosives at Sullivan House, she’d done nothing apart from rant and rave at him.
Shit! Claire knew everything he’d done! Was she even really missing? Was this some stupid game the Security Service was playing to find out what the police knew?
Jake stopped the car up the road, away from the heath. He was sweating. Nothing seemed real. He felt faint. He felt like he was looking down at himself. Sitting there in his little car; in a little tin box with wheels. He was a toy. This was a game.
Claire’s voice kept playing on a loop in his head. That night at Tiger Tiger, she’d told him in a drunken confession that she was scared. ‘If something happens to me, just look in the box by the bed,’ she’d said.
But there was nothing in the box. He’d found the game out. He wasn’t supposed to do that. She hadn’t expected him to go to Kate and find out about Biaj and see him meeting Lawrence Congerton-Jones. He was one step ahead. Just. He needed to use this to his advantage. The Dusty Bin money box by the bed must be some sort of trap, a set-up. Had to be. Claire was one of the bad guys – bad girls.
Was Biaj one of her informants? Was everything they’d had together all a game to her? All a lie, their whole relationship? Was it all a trick to get him back for one of his drunken misdemeanours? Was he just an unwitting informant too, used to monitor exactly what the police knew and were up to? Maybe she was even involved in the bombings?
Jake drove to the nearest pub, The Princess of Wales, on the other side of the heath. He was shaking. He downed several whiskies while he collected his thoughts and decided what to do next.
112
Monday
10 October 2005
1442 hours
Lorenzo’s coffee shop, Horseferry Road, Millbank, London
Jake called Claire’s boss, the man he’d seen on the heath with Biaj. Lawrence Congerton-Jones.
Anyone with a hyphenated name aroused Jake’s suspicions for reasons unknown to him. Lawrence was no exception. Jake had never liked him.
He dialled the number for the Thames House switchboard and was surprised to be put through immediately to Lawrence’s voicemail, where he left a message. Within minutes Jake’s phone was ringing back, displaying ‘withheld number’.
He answered: ‘Jake Flannagan.’
‘Jake, it’s Lawrence Congerton-Jones here, returning your call,’ he said, lengthening the ‘O’ in Jones considerably, in an exaggerated fashion.
Jake bit the bullet. ‘I need to talk to you about Claire. She’s missing.’
Jake waited for a response. The pause was too long. Lawrence was thinking.
Eventually there was a reply. ‘I thought she was on holiday. Cornwall she said.’ Lawrence’s tone was even and without nuance. Jake now couldn’t tell whether he knew anything at all.
‘Yes, she was supposed to meet me there on Monday – she didn’t turn up. I drove back up here to London to find her.’
‘Have you reported her missing?’
Again Lawrence’s response seemed odd. Unflustered, not at all anxious. Maybe Jake was overthinking it?
‘Can we meet to discuss it please, Lawrence?’
There was another long pause.
‘Of course. When?’ came the reply.
‘Now. In the coffee shop just up from Thames House on Horseferry Road. The place with the red sign.’
Jake didn’t want Lawrence to have time to prepare for the meeting, or be able to plan anything.
‘OK… yes… I’ll… I’ll be there in a minute.’ Jake sensed a slight reluctance in Lawrence’s voice.
‘I’m sitting at the back,’ said Jake, as he hung up.
Fifteen minutes later and Lawrence walked through the door, smartly dressed as always. He was accompanied by a large, heavyset man, whom Jake didn’t recognise, but who was also sporting an expensive suit. Jake stood up and shook both their hands. Lawrence’s accomplice stayed silent.
‘A friend of mine,’ said Lawrence, as they sat down. Neither asked for a drink. Unfortunate. Jake wouldn’t be able to get the DNA off either of their coffee cups. He could have done with the saliva from the rims for comparison with anything found in the Transit van.
‘Let’s cut to the chase then, shall we?’ said Jake. ‘Where’s Claire?’
‘We have no idea.’ Lawrence’s response was curt.
‘Look, I have reason to believe that Claire has been kidnapped. I want to know why.’
The two Security Service men exchanged a glance.
‘How do you know that’s what has taken place?’ asked Lawrence.
‘I know much more than you think.’ Jake leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lawrence.
‘Is that an Armani suit you have on, Lawrence?’
‘What on earth makes you ask that?’
‘It looks almost identical to the one I saw hanging in Cl
aire’s wardrobe. You must think I’m stupid, Lawrence. Expensive suits, flash car, meetings with informants on your own in Blackheath. That’s not how the Security Service rolls, I know.’ Jake smirked at him, trying to pretend he knew much more than he did. Yet all he knew was that Lawrence had far too much money to burn and that something wasn’t right. The suit in the wardrobe grated on him.
A shadow passed over Lawrence’s face. Jake was beginning to push his buttons now. ‘Look here. There’s nothing to know, and even if there was, don’t you think that I, as a Security Service agent, would know more than an oik in the police?’
Lawrence’s brow furrowed like an unmade bed as he over-emphasised the ‘O’ in oik.
‘Oik?’ asked Jake, puzzled.
‘Is this an official police investigation, Inspector Flannagan, or just some flight of fancy of your own? What police resources have you been using on this jolly of yours?’
‘I’m doing my job. She didn’t turn up for our holiday,’ Jake said between clenched teeth.
‘Oh really? Well one hopes you didn’t have a police vehicle in Cornwall with you whilst on holiday? I’ve heard Claire talk about you using it for personal use, Inspector. I suspect your superiors would take a dim view of that?’
Jake was getting nowhere. This was pointless. He picked up his cup and resisted the urge to throw the dregs of his unfinished coffee into Lawrence’s face. There were plenty of witnesses, not least Lawrence’s colleague. There was no way he could say his arm had slipped and it had been an accident. The coffee was still hot and then he’d be had up for deliberately scalding the bloke.
No. It was not the right thing to do. He stood up to leave.
‘I’m a detective inspector, Lawrence, not an oik; you’d do well to remember that.’
Jake walked away from the table and settled up his bill at the counter. Furious, he left the café without even looking over his shoulder. Once outside, he turned right and began to walk back up the street. He needed to calm down and think. He ducked into the entrance of a nearby office building and stood in a large air-conditioned lobby area with purple sofas and clashing green carpets, whilst he took a few breaths.
THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. Page 31