by Condor
The one who’d given her his card, Chelsea, spoke first.
“Gabriel? This is Detective Chief Inspector Chambers. She’s my Guvnor. Can we speak to you, please? Now?”
Gabriel checked his watch.
“You can, but I’ve just been told I’m meeting the prime minister this afternoon and …”
Susannah spoke.
“You need new clothes, right? And a shower? We can make that work, can’t we Chels? Do you live in London?”
Gabriel had to think for a moment, He ran his hand over his hair and scratched the back of his head.
“No. I live in Salisbury.” And because, often, people didn’t know where that was, he added, “It’s near Stonehenge.”
Chelsea smiled at him and he noticed she had a mole on the right of her top lip, halfway between the outer edge of her nostril and the corner of her mouth. Her deep brown eyes were round, fringed with long dark lashes, and her lips were wide and full.
“I know Salisbury,” she said. “I had a mate stationed just outside in a town called Tidworth. Do you know it?”
“Of course! I drive through it on my way to meet a friend in Hungerford.”
“All of which is lovely,” Susannah interrupted. “Forgive me if I try and hurry this along, both of you, but where can we take you, Gabriel? We can talk on the way.”
Chelsea blushed, her pale skin tinting pink as the blood vessels dilated from her throat all the way up to her cheek bones.
“Sorry, Guv. So, Gabriel, do you have a friend or someone you can visit to get cleaned up?”
Gabriel showed her the screen of his phone.
“Can you take me there, please?”
She glanced down. “Sure. Come with us.”
Together they made their way back down Regent Street, through the roadblock, towards Savile Row. Pedestrians ambled between the stranded vehicles or stood around by the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus, taking selfies or videos of the huge neon advertising signs. The traffic was gridlocked, and the noise from horns and engines was deafening.
“Fucking idiots,” Susannah said. “Like hooting’s going to make things any better.”
She marched into the road and used one knuckle to knock on the window of a big black Audi saloon, whose driver was leaning repeatedly on the centre of the steering wheel, adding his air horns to the racket.
He buzzed the window down and she squatted beside him, holding her warrant card up where he could get a good look at it. Gabriel noticed a thin strip of red lace above the waistband of her jeans.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” she said in a sweet and reasonable tone, brushing her hair back from her eyes. “Do you happen to know exactly why the traffic’s so bad this morning?”
“No, officer, not really,” he said, looking down at his hands and then over at her again.
“Well, allow me to enlighten you, sir. About an hour ago, some antisocial nutcase blew themselves up on the top deck of a bus up there,” she said, pointing back towards Oxford Circus. Her voice took on a singsong rhythm. “And now, there are firefighters … paramedics … police … and soldiers trying to clean up all the blood and mess and so on. So, I wonder, as a personal favour to me, if you wouldn’t mind, awfully, not blowing your little horn, all, fucking, morning. Would that be OK? Sir?”
The man nodded, looking at Susannah then out of the windscreen again, unable to hold her gaze. “Sorry, officer, of course. It’s just, you know, frustrating.”
“Of course it is, sir,” Susannah said, all smiles and sweet reason again. “For all of us.”
She pushed herself to her feet, grunting with the effort, hitched up her jeans and strode back to the pavement and the wide-eyed stares of a knot of pedestrians.
“Come on,” she said to Gabriel and Chelsea. “Let’s get a car, stick on the blues and twos and get somewhere quieter.”
Susannah drove the unmarked silver BMW 5 Series fast down The Mall, heading for the safe house. The combination of the siren and the concealed, grille-mounted blue lights helped her carve a path through the traffic. Even so, she was sometimes forced to a standstill as the drivers of the cars and trucks in front of and beside her got tangled up with each other in their efforts to clear out of her way. While she concentrated on the route, Chelsea questioned Gabriel.
“So, where were you before the bomb went off, Gabriel?”
“At a café on Regent Street, north of Oxford Circus. It’s called Biaggi’s.”
“I know it,” Chelsea said, making a note. “Then what happened?”
“I left, and was walking to meet a new client. Then the bomb detonated.”
“What did you do next?”
“I ran down towards Oxford Circus. When I got there, I just started helping people. Basic battlefield first aid: tourniquets, compression. There wasn’t much I could do for a lot of them, but I got a few people to put their phones away and help out instead. Then I just, you know, I had to get somewhere to sit down for a minute. Then you came over to talk to me. Oh, and I found this.”
He reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out the ball bearing. He handed it to Chelsea, without looking at its shiny, distorting surface, smeared scarlet with a stranger’s blood.
“Yeah,” she said with a frown. “You shouldn’t really have taken that. It’s evidence. But,” she hurried on, as a sigh of exasperation from her boss hissed between the front and rear seats, “We’ll have quite a collection of these evil little things by the end of the day, so one stuffed into your pocket probably isn’t critical. We’ll check them all for fingerprints but I’m not too hopeful. The blast will probably have destroyed them all.” She draped a clean paper handkerchief over it and folded it into her jacket pocket. “So, apart from hearing the explosion and doing your bit with the wounded, is there anything else you can remember that we could use? Don’t prejudge it; just let me hear it. Anything at all?”
Gabriel closed his eyes. “Let me be still a moment,” he said. He willed his breathing to slow, and his heartbeat too. He tuned out the car’s siren and quieted his mind, just as his childhood tutor in Hong Kong, Master Zhao, had taught him. Nothing. Just the sweet, lemon-scented cake and the strong coffee, then the call with Britta, then the huge bang as the bomb shattered so many bodies, and lives, in one terrible instant. No. Not nothing. The girl. Yes! The anxious-looking girl with the bulky jacket.
He opened his eyes.
“I think I saw the bomber.”
7
Remembering Eloise Payne
SUSANNAH JERKED HER HEAD ROUND at Gabriel’s words, then faced forward again after a white van with three men squashed together in the front blasted its horn as she veered towards its driver’s door.
“You saw him?” she asked, giving the aggrieved builders the benefit of a full-on death stare.
Chelsea turned sideways to look at Gabriel directly. “How can you be sure?” she said.
“First of all, it wasn’t a him. It was a her.”
“Christ!” Susannah said.
“Second, I can’t be sure. Not exactly. It was when I was having my coffee. A car pulled up and this skinny girl climbed out. She looked really nervous—terrified, really. And she had a bulky, padded jacket on. Then the car pulled a U-turn, a real tyre-squealer, and headed back up Regent Street towards the Euston Road.
“Could have been anyone,” Susannah said. “Any number of reasons for a young girl to look nervous. Could have been a tart being taken to her first-ever client. Could’ve been anything.”
But Chelsea wasn’t prepared to write the lead off so quickly.
“The Guvnor’s right, Gabriel. So how come you think she was the bomber?”
Gabriel wiped his hand over his face. The dried blood specks on his skin were itching and the smell from his clothes in the cloying, heated air of the car was making him nauseous. He felt his gut roll over.
“Can you pull over, please? I’m going to be sick.”
“Shit! OK, hold on,” Susannah said. Timing her braking to
slide between a couple of black cabs, she brought the car to a screeching halt by a black and gold rubbish bin.
Gabriel wrenched the door open, leapt out and vomited painfully into the bin, his stomach cramping as it ejected a thin stream of yellow bile. Wiping his mouth on a handkerchief he pulled from his trouser pocket, he climbed back in to the car.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No need to apologise,” Susannah said. “I’m surprised you didn’t chuck up sooner after what you saw this morning. So, look. Let’s take this seriously for a minute.” Then she slammed the palm of her hand onto the steering wheel, sounding the horn and forcing a motorcyclist into the bus lane as she powered through on her way round the road junction curving north in front of Buckingham Palace. “What’s the matter, arsehole?” she yelled at the closed window. “You colour-blind or something? Thought these were flashing fucking fairy lights, did you?”
Gabriel spoke, his voice level.
“She was thin. I remember, she had bony wrists and her legs were like sticks. But inside the jacket, she looked, I don’t know, wrong somehow. I know it was a Puffa, but you can still tell when they’re mostly padding, can’t you? This one looked like she was filling it. I think she had a suicide vest on underneath it. There were two people in the car with her. A man driving and a middle-aged woman in the back with her.”
This time it was Chelsea who played the sceptic.
“Could be anorexic. Mum and Dad taking her to some clinic. Big jumper under the Puffa jacket. They get cold. No fat.”
“Yeah, not like some of us, worse luck,” Susannah chipped in from the front seat. “I could do with a few of those two-grape dinners myself.” Gabriel said nothing. “Sorry. Bad taste? It’s copper humour. You might have to get used to it while you’re riding with Chels and me. We see so much horrible stuff, the jokes are how we cope.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, “we used to do the same in the Army. Look, maybe she wasn’t the bomber. But there’ll be CCTV footage of her, won’t there? Heading down Regent Street to Oxford Circus, she’d have passed, what, five cameras? Ten?”
“We’ll be reviewing CCTV, so yes, OK, we’ll keep an eye out. Might need you to lend us your eyes though. You saw her, after all. Now, we’re here.”
Susannah pulled up outside a row of plain, cream-painted, Regency houses in a side street, a couple of blocks back from Victoria Street. As Gabriel got out, she leaned over and spoke through the open passenger-side window.
“You have DS Jones’s card, right?”
He nodded.
“OK, so get cleaned up, go and meet the prime minister, and then call. I want you at our nick tomorrow, first thing, if possible. OK?”
“Yes, fine. Thanks for the lift. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bye, Gabriel. Thanks,” Chelsea said.
He closed the door and watched as Susannah accelerated then executed a perfect sliding turn in the road, causing an oncoming taxi to screech to a halt, its horn blaring. From Victoria Station, a few hundred yards away, came the sounds of train brakes squealing and station announcements drifting on the wind. Gabriel screwed his face up against the noise. Too much. Too much blood. Too much death. His stomach churned and cramped again and he looked around for a bush or another bin. Then the spasm passed and he straightened up and turned to the front door of the house.
Unusual for a safe house to have a doorman, he thought. Especially a dead one.
“All right, Smudge?”
“Good, thanks, Boss. Never better. Apart from the face, obviously.” The dark-skinned soldier pointed at the place where his lower jaw should have been and made a tutting sound with his lolling red tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Just wait there. They’ll open the door for you.” He pointed up at a tiny video camera tucked away between the wall and a cream-painted drainpipe. “Smile. You’re on Candid Camera.”
Sure enough, the door opened silently. A man in his late twenties stood there, smiling. He wore a dove grey suit, a plain royal blue silk tie, and shiny black brogues. He beckoned Gabriel inside. Gabriel turned back to the street, but Smudge, as he’d expected, had vanished.
Once the door was closed behind him, Gabriel began to shake, uncontrollably. He felt the sweat break out all over his body in a sickly wave of clammy cold.
“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning against the wall. “I’m feeling really not good. Is there somewhere I can lie down for a bit, or preferably have a bath?”
“Of course, sir. Follow me,” the young man said, his face creased with concern, his eyes flicking up and down over Gabriel’s bloody clothes. “I’m James, by the way.”
“Gabriel.”
Trailing his left hand along the wall as he climbed the stairs to the first floor, Gabriel could feel tears starting from his eyes and he let them come, tracking down over his cheeks and dropping off his chin to mingle with the blood on the front of his waistcoat.
James stopped outside a white-painted, panelled door with a brass handle.
“You’ll find everything you need in there, sir. If you’d like to leave your clothes outside the door, I can have them cleaned for you. We have some spare stuff kept for visitors. I’ll pull out some togs for you. You’re about the same size as the last chap we had staying with us, and they fitted him fine.”
With that, he turned and walked down the hallway towards the stairs.
Gabriel pushed the door in front of him. It opened onto a bathroom, complete with claw-footed bath fed from polished copper pipes emerging from well-worn, honey-coloured floorboards. He turned on the taps and looked around the cavernous room. It was easily fifteen feet square and housed a leather sofa as well as a sink and a large wooden cupboard that turned out to contain a hot water tank and, more importantly, a tall pile of fluffy white towels that smelled faintly of lavender. On the back of the door hung a white towelling robe. Best of all, on a wooden chest set against the wall between a pair of white-painted sash windows was an ice bucket. It contained a bottle of Chablis, already uncorked. A single glass stood next to it.
While the bath was filling, steam rising from the churning surface of the water, he poured wine into the glass, drained it, then poured again. With the alcohol soothing his tattered nerves and quietening the fluttering creatures fighting for room in his stomach, he retrieved his phone, wallet, and house keys from various pockets then stripped off the ruined clothes, folded them as best he could, and left them together with his socks and shoes outside the door.
He climbed into the bath then climbed out again to retrieve the glass and the ice bucket. After taking a long pull on the wine—not what its makers would have wanted, he was sure—he placed the glass on the floor beside the bath, feeling the cold beads of condensation under his fingertips. Then he lowered himself once again into the scalding hot water and closed his eyes. He let himself slide down until the water closed over his head. For a brief moment, he considered simply taking a deep breath. It would be a certain end to the hallucinations, the panic attacks, and the nightmares. It was also a coward’s way out. And there was help available in the shape of his psychiatrist, Professor Fariyah Crace. He’d begun seeing her once a month on Don’s recommendation.
She had confirmed what Don knew and Gabriel himself had already suspected. He was suffering—and that was definitely the right word—from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He’d only met her for an initial consultation, but she’d told him he could be treated. He meant to sort it out, too. The problem was fitting in appointments around his increasingly hectic, and dangerous, work.
He surfaced with a gasp, splashing water over the sides of the tub and looking down at the pinkish water. No. Not today. If death wants me, he’s going to have to chase me down. There was soap and shampoo on a shelf by the sink. He fetched it and began, methodically, to clean every square inch of his body, bloodied or not.
The spooks, or whoever they were, had thought of everything. The mirror-fronted cabinet above the sink held disposable razors, toothbrushes,
shaving foam and all the other things you’d need to get the stink and the grime of a bomb blast off you. He finished off the second glass of wine as he shaved and was sitting on the wooden chest with a refill when there was a quiet double-knock at the door.
“Sir? It’s James. I’ve left you some clothes outside the door. There’s a bedroom next to the bathroom. I’ve been instructed by Mr Webster to let you sleep until one forty-five. He’s sending a car to collect you at two.”
Gabriel called his thanks through the door, took a sip of the wine, and fetched the clothes. Jeans, white cotton button-down shirt, and a navy V-neck sweater. Socks and underwear, and his own shoes, freshly polished and gleaming in the light from the shaded lamp overhead. The clothes were a good fit, though the combination of denim and polished black brogues gave him the look of a not-very-astute drugs squad officer trying to blend in at a festival. Still, probably good enough for the prime minister.
The ice bucket dangling from a finger by its handle, he headed next door, where he found a double bed. He finished the wine in his glass and lay down. Sat up again. Reached for his phone. Called Britta.
She answered without the phone even ringing.
“Oh, shit, Gabriel. Are you fine? Really? Swear to me or I will come and get you and …” then she stopped and he could hear her gulping for air.
“I am. I swear. It detonated a few streets away, and I went to help. I’m in one of Don’s safe houses now. I’m going after the people who did it.”
“Oh, thank God. It’s all over the news. People are tweeting these horrific pictures. It’s worse than Bosnia when we found that village. Do you remember?”
Gabriel did remember. As part of a joint Swedish-British Special Forces operation, Captains Wolfe and Falskog had been among the first soldiers to fight their way through heavily-armed Serbian resistance and retake a village largely inhabited by Bosnian Muslims. The Serbs had left nobody alive. Or intact. The smell of blood hung in the air like a dark, meaty fog and there had been nothing to do but place bodies, and body parts, of men, women and children into heavy-duty, black zip-up bags and wait for ambulances to take them away for burial.