by Roger Pearce
‘And you intend to pass this new evidence to the police?’
Gavron suppressed a laugh. She had spent a lifetime exposing liars, and Charlie Brandon’s bluff floated across on a sea of red wine. The Bull must have called him from the Jasmine the moment she left.
‘I already have,’ she said.
‘Like any good citizen.’
‘Except they completely blanked me. Still fixated on the Irish dissident bullshit.’
‘So you propose to do…what, exactly?’
‘Ask the obvious questions. The Yard are always boasting about going where the evidence leads them. Well, the investigation is flagging and I’ve just offered them the way out of the maze. Why would they wilfully reject it?’
‘They may have other tricks up their sleeve.’
‘After ten days with no arrests? No, they don’t want any new evidence to undermine their foregone conclusion.’
‘Which is?’
‘That the Real IRA have come back to bomb the mainland.’
‘Perhaps they have.’
‘Okay. But why not take a moment to follow this up?’
‘Too busy hunting actual terrorists?’
‘Or playing politics. Which is it, Charles? Incompetence, cover-up or conspiracy? What are they hiding? Those are the questions I need to ask, because no-one else will.’
Another silence. ‘Finished?’
Gavron took a sip of whiskey. ‘That’s the story I’m going to write.’
‘In which case, I’ve caught you just in time. I don’t think the public interest is served by shovelling excrement on the boys in blue. And OJ advises that a piece along those lines would be unwise. Counter-productive, even.’
Gavron groaned. Everyone knew the intervention of Ollie Jacobs, Brandon’s shit of a lawyer, spelt sudden death. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Where to start? Your priest will say anything to save himself from humiliation and jail, even if that means betraying the confessional. And if he exists, his mysterious young penitent is uncheckable, the allegations impossible to corroborate. Shall I go on? Vanessa, this is not a story I can take to market.’
‘So you’re spiking it? You and Ollie?’
‘Too many legal flies to swat. You’re proposing to interfere in a national security investigation, and that leaves us open to litigation, or even criminal proceedings. Do I need to spell it out?’
‘Is that Ollie’s opinion, or a threat from Scotland Yard?’
‘Vanessa, you offered me a scoop about a priest raping young boys…’
‘Who got to you?’
‘…not a…some deep throat in a clerical collar.’
‘You don’t really like us, do you, Charles?’
‘I hold you in the highest professional…’
‘Catholics, I mean.’
‘Please, no more insults. You have a contract with CBB.’ The voice was suddenly harsh, as if the Irishman had found himself again. ‘So keep to your side of the bargain.’
‘Stuff the bloody bargain. I’ll find a blogger.’
‘That would be unrealistic.’ A deep sigh blew down the line. ‘Look, it’s good that we work together. Take the evening off and let’s speak tomorrow. Lunch.’
The line died before she could reply. ‘Screw you, Charles.’ She watched a pleasure boat drift beneath Southwark Bridge, its deck fired by red and blue strobing lights, and wondered how many more would die if she kept silent.
She knew Brandon would not be fazed by her threat to work with a blogger. Gavron was famously elusive, resisting the lure of Facebook likes, Twitter feeds, prizes and celebrity. She always traced her leads from the shadows, letting the exclusive speak for itself.
She went into the kitchen, clattered ice into her tumbler and poured more Bushmills. Two powerful men had leaned on her in less than six hours, as if she suddenly posed some kind of threat, and the challenge gripped her. A new plan edged alongside the story as she sat by the window, energised and fearless.
Gavron kept her valuables in the bedroom, hidden inside a small safe in her wardrobe. She hurried there now, took out her contacts book and flicked through the crowded pages. It took a while, for she was searching for someone she had met recently, first name only.
She took a sip of whiskey, wriggled back into her chair and dialled.
•••
Wednesday, 19 October, 22.19, Robyn’s Apartment, Tor Cervara, Rome
Robyn had forgotten to mute her phone when they collapsed onto the bed. Later, shaken awake by Kerr’s call from his girlfriend, she had been aware of him pushing the duvet back and pattering across the cold tiles into the soggiorno, his voice and body language quickened by guilt. Inquisitive, she had strained to eavesdrop on the conversation, until his murmuring faded to a whisper and she dozed off again. One of them must have knocked her own phone to the floor, where it lay hidden beneath her jeans. It took her a moment to track the ring tone and feel beneath the pile of clothes. ‘Pronto.’
‘Buona sera. Can I speak to Robyn? It’s Vanessa.’
‘Oh…Hi. Hello.’
‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘No,’ said Robyn, sitting up in bed. ‘It’s fine.’
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
Robyn checked the screen, relieved to see the name there. ‘Of course,’ she said, as memories popped into her brain: Guinness and cocktails in a teeming hotel bar, her round, my round, both shouting to make themselves heard. ‘How are you?’
‘Good, thanks. Did you get back okay?’
‘Usual security alert. You?’
‘Robyn, I know it’s late but I need your help.’
‘For the project?’
‘The London bombs, and it’s very urgent. Look, when we were in the bar you told me you had a boyfriend in Special Branch.’
‘Confessions?’ said Robyn, rubbing her eyes. ‘God, was I that pissed?’
‘I was wondering…you know…if you’re still in touch?’
‘Off and on. But he’s secret squirrel, and they don’t talk to reporters. Sorry.’
‘This isn’t for a story. I’m trying to pass information, not buy it. One of the good guys, for a change. And you trust him, right?’
‘Your little black book must be full of real coppers?’
‘For this, I need an outsider.’
‘Well, he’s certainly that.’
‘Someone to listen to what I have to say, then do something with it. Will you give him my number?’
‘I’ll ring him.’ She watched Kerr finish his call and stand quietly for a moment, slowly shaking his head. ‘But I can’t promise anything, love. You know what they’re like.’
‘Cops?’
‘Men.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
Thursday, 20 October, 09.57, Piccadilly Underground Line
With grey beanie pulled low on his forehead, Kenny watched the little girl hop onto the crowded carriage at Caledonian Road station. Her teenage mother gripped the hood of her coat in one hand and, with the other, a pushchair and green Bag for Life identical to the one resting between Kenny’s legs. In bobble hat and woollen tights, dummy clamped in her mouth, the child clambered onto a priority seat opposite Kenny while Mum scrolled through a technicolour smartphone, probably clinging to her own vanishing childhood. Too young to spot stranger danger, the toddler threw Kenny such an open smile that her dummy dropped to the floor, tumbling against his bag. ‘Ta,’ said Mum as Kenny reached a gloved hand to retrieve it, her spare thumb never leaving the phone.
Operating solo for the first time, Kenny had taken the secure route beside the railway track to Finsbury Park tube, and his right leg ached painfully, even through the mist of cocaine. He looked along the carriage. Apart from a few oldies leafing through the Metro, everyone was streaming music or locked onto a screen: girls in headscarves jolting against eastern Europeans and bearded men wearing turbans; suits beside trackies; heels, trainers and muddy work boots; everyone thrown together undergroun
d, isolated by social media. This morning Kenny took a special interest in London’s melting pot, for the bomb at his feet was already ticking.
Beneath Holborn the train remained at the platform. The delay sent Kenny a pulse of alarm, for his device no longer carried a priming switch, reducing him to a mule smuggling a cache of drugs. An angry Bobby Roscoe had removed the bomb from the safe house to be ‘re-engineered overnight’ with a long-delay timer to detonate the kilo of Semtex at eleven o’clock precisely. ‘It’s a whizzy smart bomb we have now,’ Roscoe had growled that morning when he and Fin returned with his wheelie bag. ‘Thinks for itself. Even you can’t fuck this one up.’
Fear had been pricking Kenny’s skin since whirring into the tunnel at Finsbury Park, passing the point of no return. Ten days ago Roscoe had bragged about the Victoria bomb, too, and his timing had been way off, catching passers-by with no connection to Rafal Eisner Capital Bank. Sickened by the thought of the same nightmare below ground, Kenny stole another glance at his fellow travellers, trapped in the wrong place and time. ‘What if it goes off early?’ he had asked Roscoe, unthinking. ‘On the tube, I mean. We’re not aiming at them, are we?’ To his dismay, Fin had joined in Roscoe’s laugh, both of them mocking the weak link, the thin-skinned kid who had bottled it at Canary Wharf and fretted about ‘collateral damage.’
At last, the driver explained that they were being held ‘to regulate the service.’ Kenny fidgeted as more passengers boarded the train and angled past him, wincing as a woman’s boot kicked against the bag. After an age, the doors swept shut and the train continued west towards Covent Garden. His cramped leg gave another spasm as he looked around at the new intake: different people, same diversity, isolation and fate. He glanced at his watch, a reflex action since leaving the safe house: forty-seven minutes to detonation. The toddler, half-hidden behind a woman’s flapping raincoat, crammed crisps into her mouth with a chubby hand and flashed him another rosy smile.
On the approach to Hyde Park Corner the train came to a sharp halt. The operator’s microphone clicked open, then the voice, barely audible, crackling something about a stalled train ahead. They had stopped deep inside the tunnel, sending Kenny another stab of alarm: forty-four minutes, provided the timer was as smart as Roscoe said. In the restless silence he lifted the bag onto his lap and leaned forward, as if protecting it from a rain shower. Droplets of sweat plopped onto the plastic as he stared at the black woollen scarf folded over the bomb, convinced he must be signalling fear or threat. To his left, a middle-aged woman sat with a book that might have been a Bible or the Koran; above him, the woman in the raincoat stood engrossed in an oversize Kindle. The stillness of the carriage magnified every sound and movement, but only the child seemed to notice he was special.
The watch beckoned again: thirty-eight minutes. With a deep breath, he folded back a corner of the scarf to glimpse Roscoe’s newfangled timer attachment. It was a silver metal sphere, about the size of a golf ball, fixed to the plastic carton, and he narrowed his eyes into lasers, as if will power alone could make time stand still.
His target was Caja Soller Direct, a Spanish finance house in Gloucester Road, and he closed his eyes to visualise every step of the recce. Four minutes from the station to the bank, two to slip down the service road behind Harry’s Handishop, dodge the CCTV camera at each end of the street and conceal the bomb in one of three giant black wheelie bins. Four minutes to get clear. Gloucester Road station was two stations away from Hyde Park Corner, say, seven minutes, even if they started now. Another message from the driver, irritable and terse, a non-apology for a lack of information, somebody else’s fault. People were making faces at each other now, shrugs of commuter camaraderie: ‘all in this together, what can you do?’ He knew from TV that broken down tube trains caused long delays. Jesus, he had seen passengers on the track, stumbling by torchlight.
Thirty-six minutes. Kenny had to plant the bomb and get clear before Bobby Roscoe’s coded warning brought hundreds of cops wailing to the scene. He folded back the scarf and held the bag closer. Think. Think. His brain froze, refusing to do the maths, while the bomb in his lap ticked down with split second accuracy.
•••
Thursday, 20 October, 10.23, Betta Tyre and Exhaust, Old Oak Common Lane, Willesden
Reversed against the workshop entrance, the horsebox fitted snugly beneath Bobby Roscoe’s new roof. He had collected it from Luton early that morning, before sunrise. Fin had trailed him down the M1 in the battered Ford van he used for work, with Kenny’s reconfigured bomb, already primed, wedged against the spare wheel in the back. They had delivered the shopping bag bomb to the safe house, Fin helping Kenny strap his leg as he talked him through every detail of his mission. Roscoe had silently produced a couple of twenty pound notes and waited impatiently while the brothers snorted cocaine together, too angry to speak to Kenny. ‘Screw up again and you’re dead,’ was all he had grunted as they left, once Fin was out of earshot.
Leaving Kenny to walk the circuitous route to the station with his Bag for Life, they had driven back to Willesden to prepare the horsebox for its final journey. While Roscoe made coffee and breakfast on the gas ring in the workshop, Fin sponged the bodywork and hosed it down before the heat of the sun could smear the soap. The Englishman had been silent on the run to Luton, making Fin park in a side street and stay in the van while he met the bombmaker in secret. Only now did he vent about Kenny’s disappearance the previous afternoon, a breach of operational discipline that remained a mystery to them both.
Roscoe checked the oil, tyres and brake lights to minimise the risk of breaking down or being pulled over by the cops. Even with a near empty fuel tank, the horsebox weighed three kilograms heavier since being driven off the ferry at Harwich, due to the Semtex carefully kneaded into the narrow space secreted behind the driver’s compartment. The exact time of detonation was known only to the Luton bombmaker, Bobby Roscoe and whoever lay behind them.
Roscoe’s Topaz warning calls aside, both bombs would resonate with deadly IRA history, a neat frame-up of precedent and pedigree. The golf balls attached overnight to the horsebox and Kenny’s plastic carton were bespoke, digital variants of the long-delay timing device used in the 1984 bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel, when the IRA had attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet. The vehicle was also highly symbolic: in 2000, Special Branch had foiled an IRA plot to explode a horsebox bomb in central London.
When everything was ready, Roscoe collected another pay-as-you-go phone from his office. He paused to admire his handiwork while Fin emptied the bucket and rolled the hosepipe.
‘Has to be there by now,’ said Roscoe. ‘Is the kid going to come through?’
Fin shrugged into his denim jacket, impatient to return to the safe house. ‘Did you give him any choice?’
‘Bollocks. Would you have risked it? Trusted him to flick the switch?’ Roscoe used his sleeve to rub the driver’s wing mirror. ‘This time it’ll blow, one way or the other. Let me know if he gets back.’
‘If?’
‘Unless we see him spattered all over the news.’ Roscoe gave a sour laugh, filling Fin with an overwhelming urge to break his neck there and then. Instead, he checked the watch he had synchronised with Kenny’s just before they separated.
‘Haven’t you got a call to make?’
‘You should have kept a closer watch on that kid.’ He shoved past, powering up the phone, and Fin let him go.
•••
Thursday, 20 October, 10.42, Piccadilly Line
Several minutes into a news blackout from the driver, Kenny’s train crawled a few metres along the tunnel and promptly gave up. Peering inside the bag again, he could just make out the detonator through the opaque plastic, a silver cylinder the size of an AA battery. It narrowed at one end, reminding him of the rifle round a drugs dealer had once used to threaten him in Belfast. Against the opposite edge were two fatter batteries, bound together with black tape. Kenny glanced down the
carriage, seeing the faces of people who would die here with him, hundreds of feet underground. The watch again: twenty-seven minutes. He closed his eyes. Too late.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Suddenly he was back in St Jude’s Church, kneeling before the lattice screen, beneath the wooden crucifix. Veins tracing the old priest’s cheek, the lips fleshy, his voice probing, inquisitive.
Hand shaking, he pressed his thumb against the lid of the carton. It clicked open and he froze again, waiting for the explosion. Nothing. Just Father Michael’s voice in his head again. Turn back from sin. He felt cling film wrapped around the Semtex, the explosive soft and malleable, like the modelling clay he had played with at school. Then the train whirred off again, brushing his fingers against the detonator and sending his heart into his mouth. He wiped his face, slithery with sweat. The priest again. When was his last confession? Kenny had wandered into St Jude’s Church after his failure at Canary Wharf, and returned yesterday afternoon, at the priest’s injunction. Across the carriage, the little girl was studying him carefully. Harm no more.
They crept into Knightsbridge station and the whooshing of the opening doors pulled Kenny back, the platform’s cool air drawing him to freedom. He could run away, abandoning the bomb on the train, or carry it up to the street and dump it somewhere close. Shamed, he listened to the voice through the screen again, sonorous, calm, with a kind of absolution. Make satisfaction for your sins. The words rooted him to the spot as more innocents pushed on board. This would be his act of penance: to stay with them, hold the bag close, own the atrocity. The watch: twenty-two minutes.
He was staring at the platform advertisements when the doors closed, his eyes chasing movies, books and exhibitions as the train moved off. Inside the bag again, he found two wires trailing from the battery pack, pulled them loose, and felt for the golf ball. Whizzy. Thinks for itself, Roscoe had said, convincing Kenny he had not done enough. A timer so advanced must have its own power source, the old-fashioned batteries no more than a back-up. The bomb was still live.
The train slowed for Gloucester Road station. This would be how he redeemed himself, expiated his sins. Bobby Roscoe had threated to kill him if he turned back, but the priest held out the possibility of eternal life.