The Prime Minister of Britain shook hands with the President of the United States while, behind them, the presidential jet screamed. The President leaned towards him.
‘I’ll be counting on you, Alan,’ she said.
The Prime Minister nodded. ‘I hope you will.’ The President turned, surrounded by her guards, and walked lithely towards the plane. It was very cold on the tarmac and Petherbridge tried not to shiver as the aircraft taxied. The perimeter of Hamscott Common was two-deep in armed soldiers. Two helicopters rattled overhead. The permanent vigil, which consisted of five cold and obstinate peace demonstrators, had been arrested and their benders in the trees dismantled three days ago, before the President landed. The road to London had been cleared of all traffic for the cavalcade.
During her whole visit, the President had moved inside a half-mile wide cordon of empty streets and buildings. The ostensible reason for this was fear of terrorism, but the Prime Minister also knew that he could not allow the President to see the huge public demonstrations against her. Not that she was unaware of them. Petherbridge had hurried to reassure her. ‘The people who matter are with you. The rest will follow.’
‘You will back us?’ said the President.
‘Of course,’ said Alan Petherbridge.
The Silent Duck, Shepherd’s Bush Green, London W12. January 14th, 2016. 3.30 p.m.
William Frith waited for Mo Al Fasi at the pub in the side street where they’d met in September. Mo had rung and asked to see him. William didn’t know why. His own flat was still occupied by the Sutcliffes.
William and Lucy had spent Christmas in Spain with William’s parents. They had both found the situation difficult to explain. On a walk through pines, the sun bright above and a light sprinkling of snow on the ground William’s mother had cried, ‘Why? Why, William? It makes no sense.’
‘Things are getting worse,’ William had replied, vaguely. ‘All these worries about another war and all these demonstrations …’
In spite of his job, or perhaps because of it, William was not interested in politics. His mother, however, was. ‘The European Parliament’s more and more concerned about the American military having bases in Britain, without any checks at all. There’ll be trouble with Europe if Britain goes to war with Iraq. But why do the Sutcliffes think they’re safer in Shepherd’s Bush? It’s not rational.’
‘Marie isn’t rational, Mum. You know that. I told you, she wants us all to die together.’
‘I’m surprised that with her head-in-the-sand attitude she even knows what’s happening,’William’s mother said tartly. ‘That woman needs urgent professional treatment. Anyway, the situation’s ridiculous. Do you want us to come over and give you an excuse to say you need the room so they’ll have to leave …?’
‘Not for the moment, Mum. We’re all right for now. Joe’s talking about making a move. And Marie’s seeing a counsellor. Let’s see how it goes.’
But William’s mother remained unconvinced.
William was unhappy about what Mo might say. Did he want the flat back? Joe was paying towards the mortgage now and the family had settled into a bearable routine, eating together four or five times a week and spending most of the remaining time apart. But life was still hard, worse than William had been prepared to tell his mother. Marie was, as he had said, seeing a counsellor, but this was not the first, nor the second counsellor she had seen since she arrived in London. In fact, Mrs Wilmot was the fourth, Marie having seen off the first three by suddenly taking a turn for the worse during therapy – when they began to get too close to making recommendations, said Lucy.
As to the Sutcliffes’ move – William had not exactly lied to his mother about it but had not told the truth either. Just before leaving for Spain William had taken the bull by the horns and asked Joe what his plans were. He made the point that if Joe and Marie ever wanted to see a grandchild the situation could not go on as it was. Joe had countered by saying that he and Marie had been discussing selling up and moving to London. He suggested that because, however hard they saved, William and Lucy alone would only be able to get a slightly larger flat with a bigger mortgage, William and Lucy should also sell up, then both couples could pool their funds and buy a much bigger house in a nicer area. It was obvious to William that Joe had been thinking about this, checking the prices and doing the sums. And that Marie agreed with the plan, or, when it had been broached, had at least not burst into tears and collapsed, which was, effectively, agreement.
William saw this was no time for tact and diplomacy. Joe had to be told, now, that his plan was off. There was no room for compromise or manoeuvre. He told Joe that he and Lucy liked the area they lived in and wanted to stay there. He added, ruthlessly, that he was not sure that it was a good idea for two – three, counting the baby – generations to live together. Hearing this Joe had looked at his son-in-law in an unfriendly way and remarked that, if that was how William felt, then there was no more to be said about it.
The Silent Duck was empty except for a couple of old geezers, at a table with their pints. Mo rushed in, dressed in a well-cut suit and a very white shirt. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘Accident on the M2 on the way back from the accountants.’
‘Got you some orange,’ William told him, pushing one of the glasses in front of Mo, who sat down. Mo took a swig. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I need it.’
‘So how’s it going?’
Mo looked at him ruefully, ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Going’s the word.’
‘Ah,’ said William. ‘Going where?’
‘Morocco,’ Mo said. ‘All of us. The whole family.’
‘All of you?’
‘Yep,’ said Mo. ‘Me and my wife and the kids, Jemal, Faisal and his wife and kids, my sisters, their husbands and kids, my dad, my uncle, probably – all of us.’
William’s heart sank. ‘That’s a bit of an upheaval. The kids are at school – isn’t your niece just starting medical school?—what brought it on?’
‘Well, there’s been constant harassment of Muslims, you’ll know that. There’s going to be a war with Iraq – what do you think that’ll do to us? Raids, arrests, imprisonments. The President of the US is pulling Petherbridge’s strings. When she insists Britain is a nest of terrorists and spies Petherbridge will go along. Life won’t be worth living. What’s he getting out of it, Petherbridge? He must have been paid. Now he’s giving more power to the Specials. We know what that means. Remember Bob Harris?’
William was shaken by the certainty and ferocity of Mo’s diatribe and couldn’t work out where Bob Harris came in. Bob and his mates had hung about the school bullying smaller boys and taking their money, phones and watches. They carried knives. William had been one of their victims until he got big and well-connected enough. It was known, but never proved, that Harris and his gang were responsible for the suicide of a boy.
‘I thought he went into youth detention,’ William said.
‘May have done,’ Mo said, ‘but he’s Auxiliary Police now. That’s who the Auxilaries are recruiting thugs. They got my cousin Hamed two months ago. He’s sixteen. We didn’t know where he was until he turned up two weeks later, crying. It’s happening all the time. And these Auxilaries follow the girls about and try to get them in corners and pull their headscarves off – it’s like they’re fair game.’
William felt a twinge of guilt. He remembered the night when, coming home from work in the early hours of the morning he’d witnessed the heavy-handed stop-and-search on Shepherd’s Bush Green. Should he have done anything? What could he have done? He’d thought the guy was probably holding drugs anyway.
Mo continued. ‘Just before Christmas the cops kicked in Faisal J’s door – remember him? The kid who never did his homework and then got ten GCSEs?’
‘Oh – yes,’ William remembered.
‘He’s got his own computer repair firm now. So they kick in his door in Ealing, terrify his pregnant wife, the kids wake up, everyone’s screaming and crying – they
run right round the house flinging open doors and throwing everything on the floor. Then, without a word, they leave.’
William, trying to find some justification for this, asked, ‘What did they want?’
‘They said he’d been facilitating terrorist groups. He’s got business contacts with Saudi and Iran. They must have been bugging his emails. Anyway, they took his computer and three bin bags of papers. Luckily, FJ had most of it backed up at work or his business would have gone down the drain. He’s not involved in anything – when would he find the time? He hardly goes near the mosque. You can see what I’m telling you, William. Faisal J yesterday, me tomorrow – what am I supposed to think? My dad’s been here forty years; I was born here; my kids were born here – but there’s nothing for us now, with all this. It’ll only get worse. We’re afraid of how much worse. We’re not the only ones leaving.’
‘Jesus,’ said William, shocked.
‘Whoever,’ said Mo. ‘My uncle’s even helping people out with money if they want to go back to Morocco even though they can’t afford it.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Not really. The women are crying, the kids are slamming doors – but what choice have I got?’
‘I suppose you’re selling everything up?’
‘That’s the point. We’re keeping a house here, just in case things change. But everything else has already gone – that’s why I was at the accountant’s. So, basically, your flat has already been sold. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have done it, but—’
‘You’ve got to put your family first,’William told him. ‘How long have we got?’
‘A couple of weeks. The new owner understands the situation. He won’t put any pressure on you.’
‘We’ll go at the end of the week,’ William said.
‘Thanks, William. Sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier. It was complicated.’
‘Oh, well,’ said William. ‘It’s back to the in-laws.’
Mo, who lived with his wife, his three children, his Moroccan mother-in-law and a young cousin, looked at him flatly. William suspected he saw the Western family’s habit of living apart, in small self-contained units, as both a luxury and an evasion of duty. William had married for love, Mo for a combination of reasons, love not being top of the list. He had been unlucky. His wife annoyed him and she, in turn, thought too often of the young Moroccan she might have married. In contrast William’s parents were in Spain, his twice-divorced doctor brother was in Canada and he seldom saw his sister, a busy lawyer. William and Lucy lived alone, or had done.
‘You going to live in the new house?’ William enquired. The family had been building a house in Morocco, brick by brick, tile by tile, over all the years of Mo’s boyhood. He’d seen it once, on holiday, two storeys high and still roofless standing under a blue sky on a piece of land over-looking the sea.
‘In a lot of ways, we’ll be better off,’ Mo said.
‘That’s right,’ agreed William, but he knew Mo didn’t mean it.
‘I’m really sorry you’re going,’ said William, remembering the joints they’d smoked behind the council flat garages, or in Noddy Watkins’ house while his mother was at work, the stupid teenage parties, the stupid dangerous exploits.
The two men embraced awkwardly, banging each other on the back.
‘Keep in touch,’ Mo said.
‘Right,’ said William. But he thought they probably would not. He went back to the little room where he and Lucy had been happy and looked gloomily at the umbrella plant, Charlie, which had grown a foot during the autumn it had spent out on the patio and, now glossy and repotted, stood by the window. Even Charlie would not be so happy in future, he thought, shoved back on the bedroom floor again. Now he’d have to tell Lucy. He didn’t know what she’d say. They couldn’t go trudging round the letting agencies, looking at awful flats. If Lucy said she wanted to she could go alone. William was prepared to do only one thing – confront his in-laws and ask them, firmly, to leave.
Lucy came in blithely with some shopping, announced the menu for the evening and suggested renting a DVD. When she observed William’s downcast face, asked him what the matter was and heard they would have to give up the flat, she crashed – it had been a long, hard day – and she burst into tears. After a cup of tea she declared, ‘We’ll have to go back to the flat. It’s too expensive to rent round here. At least we can save more money.’
William shook his head. ‘Lucy,’ he said, an appeal to reason, a call to action.
There was a long pause. ‘I’ll ask Dad and Mum to go tomorrow.’
‘It’s the only way,’ William agreed, concealing his delight.
‘Eat here – eat out?’ Lucy asked.
‘Out,’ he said.
As they sat down at the Venezia, they ordered and stared at each other, thinking of the ordeal to come. Then there was a loud, reverberating bang, which shook the windows. The floor under their feet trembled. This, in a city, means only one thing.
There was a dead silence in the restaurant. The waiter, who had reached their table with the starters, put the plates down gently on the table and then put a hand on it, to steady himself. ‘Scusi,’ he said. They waited for a second detonation, which did not come. Another waiter got up off the floor, looking embarrassed, and brushed himself down.
‘A bomb,’ said Lucy. She got out her mobile phone saying, ‘I’d better ring the hospital.’ The sister in charge of her ward had heard nothing about the bomb, but as they were speaking her internal phone rang. Lucy waited.
Then she said, ‘All right, then.’ She said to William, ‘They’re calling in the off-duty staff.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said William.
They never got to the hospital. First, they smelt smoke and burning rubber. Then, round the cordoned off TV Centre was a disco-night of flashing lights from the emergency services. White-suited, masked figures stood by white vehicles. From the street they could see, under the arc lamps, the shattered window of the foyer and, just inside, an old van, surrounded by twenty men and women, some in police uniform, some in civilian clothes and some in white protective suits. Inside the reception centre of the building paramedics under emergency lighting were bending over bodies inside. As they watched, a woman with blood streaming down her face came staggering out between two green-over-alled men. Firemen were trying to prise open a lift door. There was a smell of fire. As they stood outside the cordon, taking in the scene, a man wandered past them, dazed, his white T-shirt streaked with black.
A young policeman came up to them. ‘You can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘You might be at risk.’ William, already feeling sick, noted that the policeman was afraid, and trying not to show it.
‘I’m a nurse,’ said Lucy. ‘You’d better let me through.’
The policeman did not protest as she took off her coat, handed it to William, kissed him on the cheek and ducked under the cordon. William watched his wife walk steadily through the flashing lights, the uniformed police, the firemen, and the men in white protective clothing towards the building. He stood with the smell of smoke in his nostrils looking at the lights, through which particles of dust from the explosion were still drifting. His instinct was to go on standing there, as if by being there he could prevent a second explosion, the one which might kill his wife. He waited, seeing paramedics carrying a figure on a stretcher towards an ambulance, a policeman supporting a woman with one leg dragging uselessly behind her, towards the same vehicle. He fixed his eyes on the van but could not see Lucy.
The same young policeman came up to him, ‘You’ll have to leave. We have to keep the scene clear,’ he said.
And William went back to the flat to tell Joe. As soon as he got there he wished he’d gone anywhere but there. The TV was on, showing the devastation at the TV Centre and in the middle of the room Joe Sutcliffe was holding his wife, who was writhing and sobbing in his arms. Joe looked over his wife’s head. ‘Where’s Lucy?’
‘She stayed to help,’ he told
his father-in-law.
43 Basing Street, London E1. January 15th, 2016. 8.30 a.m.
‘I can’t, Millie. I can’t,’ Julia Baskerville was saying to her crying seven-year-old. ‘Nothing will happen to me. I promise.’ She spoke over the ringing of her unattended phone, which, like the scene between mother and daughter had been going for an hour. ‘Honestly, Millie. I’m going to be all right. There’s nothing to worry about.’
In response, Millie wrenched herself from her mother’s arms, marched across the room in her MonsterMoo pyjamas and turned on the TV, which Julia had turned off an hour earlier. It had been her fault that, upstairs checking her handbag and briefcase, she had not detected Millie getting up and going downstairs to turn on the TV. Millie, in search of cartoons, had found the news. Now, for a second time, the scenes of carnage at the TV Centre, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, the woman reeling from the doors with blood streaming down her head, the paramedics easing a boy on to a stretcher, were playing in Basing Street, as they were all over the country. Millie, old enough to understand that her mother led her life in a place which might be targeted by bombers, did not want her to leave for the House of Commons. She did not want to go to school. She wanted them to stay at home, together, or, she suggested, buy tickets and go to join Daddy in America.
Julia had tried to reassure her daughter but could not, truthfully, pretend that if there were to be other bombings, the House of Commons was not a likely target. She could not deny that they might both be safer in Houston.
‘I have to go, Millie. It’s my job. I can’t run away,’ she said, as a spokesman for the Home Office rallied the nation in familiar phrases, condemning senseless violence, stating that there was a relentless hunt for the perpetrators, urging the traditional British virtues of courage and determination in the face of tragedy, and saying that all our hearts were with the dead and injured and their families. Julia switched the set off. ‘You can run away. You can,’ Millie said.
Julia had told her daughter often enough how to behave when approached by someone she mistrusted: ‘Scream and run away.’ Now Millie cried out, ‘Run away, Mummy! Or you might die!’
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