by Rob Wyllie
A Rob Wyllie paperback
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Rob Wyllie Books, Derbyshire, United Kingdom
Copyright @ Rob Wyllie 2020
The right of Rob Wyllie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted. in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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A Matter of Disclosure
Rob Wyllie
PROLOGUE
It was parked opposite the main entrance of the building, taking no notice of the fading school safety zone markings painted on the street. For several months now, the school had run a largely ineffective campaign to stop their cadre of entitled, high net worth parents parking their Range-Rovers, BMWs and Mercedes in the zone at drop-off and collection time. But today, the prime spot was taken by an unremarkable white van sporting the anonymous logo of one of dozens of parcel delivery firms that have sprouted like crazy in this Amazon age.
3.15pm on a sunny September afternoon and a shrieking multi-cultural mass of Year Ones and Twos streamed into the playground in their neat white polo-shirts and grey trousers and skirts. Outside the gate, a troupe of expensively-dressed yummy-mummies, many with toddlers in arms, talked of designer brands, reality TV stars, property prices, hopeless husbands and fantasy lovers, as was their daily routine. The fathers, fewer in number, talked Fulham, Arsenal, Chelsea and made politically-incorrect observations under their breath about the attractiveness or otherwise of the mothers assembled at the gate. Then gradually the Lucys, Milos, Nikitas and Aarons began to emerge on to the pavement, some scanning the street for their mothers or child-minders, others reluctant to leave behind their playmates. Before long the throng had spilled into the street, in a scene that was repeated here every day as in countless primary schools up and down the land. Such an easy target.
No-one noticed as the driver of the white van started her engine and gently slipped the gear selector into Drive. It sat idling for a few moments as she gave thanks to her god for choosing her for this important work, and then there was a roar from the engine as she jammed the wooden stake against the accelerator pedal and a screech of tyres as the brake was released, sending two and a half tonnes of metal careering across the road at a frightening speed. There were no screams at first, the ghastly horror being played out in silent slow motion, young bodies tossed into the air like skittles, pushchairs transformed into unrecognisable masses of twisted plastic and aluminium, a dozen or more lives crushed out of existence in an instant under the wheels of the van or against the sturdy stone wall of the school. It was all over in a heartbeat.
Except it wasn't over. As a stunned crowd began to gather around the scene, unable to even begin to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened, the electronic timer crudely taped to the dashboard counted down the last few seconds of its life. Five...four...three...two...one...zero.
Across the street, a safe distance away, the hooded driver gave a smile of satisfaction before slinking away un-noticed into the leafy backwaters of Notting Hill.
Chapter 1
She had awoken a full hour before dawn, bounding out of bed bursting with excitement about what lay ahead. The most important day of her career, ever. Not for the first time in recent months, she left behind an empty bed, for that day Philip was to be show-boating for the international media in the Lebanon, pretty much a normal day for this rock-star of the human-rights industry. Checking her phone, she saw he had sent her a text. 'Big day! Best of luck, tough case but hope it all goes well p.s. in Jerusalem tomorrow, back Friday.'
No kisses, and not exactly an optimistic tone, but defending a child-murdering terrorist bomber was never going to be easy. And tough case, that was the understatement of the decade. Pulling on her dressing gown, she crept quietly into Ollie's bedroom, kissing him lightly on the cheek without disturbing him. There was just time for a quick shower before getting dressed. But at least this morning there was no need for Maggie to do what she had done almost every morning for the last two or three months. Opening the doors on her husband's side of their fitted wardrobe, slowly and methodically, working from left to right, searching through the pockets of Philip's suits. Because yesterday, after over one hundred days of drawing a blank, she had found what she was looking for. Evidence. A payment receipt from The Ship, which she vaguely knew to be a trendy gastropub in Shoreditch, just round the corner from Philip's office. Two hundred and sixty-nine pounds - about the going rate for dinner for two at that over-rated establishment. And the date on the slip - two weeks ago on Thursday, recent enough for her to remember that evening he came in after midnight, trailed by a faint but discernible scent of perfume. Expensive perfume, because Philip wouldn't be cheating with some cheap tart. He said he had been in a client meeting all evening. He was always in client meetings, according to him. Liar.
She sank down on the edge of her bed, briefly covering her face with her hands. Glancing up, she caught sight of her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Forty-two years old, the shimmery bloom of youth now gone. Was she still attractive? On a good day perhaps she was, but she had to face it. If she wasn't quite in the autumn of her years, it was definitely late summer. But she wasn't going to cry, not on this day of all days, a day she hoped would turn out to be special. The breakthrough. She had to shut everything else out of her mind. Keep calm and carry on.
Running downstairs to fix a quick coffee, she was momentarily surprised to find Daisy already up and about. Most days her niece - more accurately, Philip's niece, the only daughter of his twin brother Hugo and currently employed as their temporary nanny - would not surface until well past 7.30am and then there would be a frenzied explosion of activity compressed into ten minutes or less as Ollie was dragged from his bed then dressed, breakfasted and ushered into the old Fiesta for the frantic three-mile drive to school.
'Morning,' Daisy mumbled, distractedly stirring a mug of instant coffee with one hand whilst scrolling her phone with the other. Maggie noted that her niece's usual sullen mood was present and correct, but that she was already dressed, looking uncharacteristically conventional in a pretty Boden print dress, her unruly mass of red hair neatly held back with a cheap faux tortoise-shell clasp. Then she remembered that for Daisy too, this was going to be a special day.
'Good morning Daisy dear, you look nice. Of course, you're going to visit your dad today, aren't you, I've just remembered. Will you be ok?'
'Of course, why shouldn't I be?' Daisy said. 'It's no big deal.'
Actually it is a big deal, thought Maggie, visiting your father in prison for the first time, but there was nothing to be gained from expressing that view right now. Daisy was angry, angry with the world. Angry because she had lost her addict mother when she was only ten, the wound still open and raw. Angry with her activist father for continually putting his pathetic causes ahead of the needs of his vulnerable young daughter. And especially angry with her aunt for failing to get him off the manslaughter charge. It hadn't been her finest hour, Maggie had to admit, but there was only so much a defence barrister could do in the face of overwhelming evidence, and a guilty verdict had been inevitable no matter what she had said. He was damn lucky not to have been charged with murder and damn lucky to get away with an eight-year sentence, considering the seriousness of the offence, that was Maggie's blunt view. Hugo Brooks had
been -still was - an arse and fully deserved everything that he got, but no, you couldn't very well say that to your nineteen-year-old niece.
Instead she said, somewhat uncertainly, 'Well, as long as you are going to be alright. There's money in the drawer for a taxi, and of course you need to be there on time or else they won't let you in, so just allow plenty of leeway. But you know that already. And remember, you don't need to worry about collecting Ollie from school today, he's going back with Felicity Swift to play with his friend Tom.'
Daisy didn't look up from her phone, her thumbs tapping out a message to an unknown recipient. An angry message, if the ferocity with which she smashed down on the keypad was any guide. 'Yeah, as you say, I know all that already. I'll be fine'.
Maggie's Uber arrived at 6.15am as arranged, and was soon threading its way through the quiet streets of Hampstead on the wet and gloomy April morning. By 7.20 am she was at her desk. Yesterday, she had printed out the email and its attachment and was now reading it for what must have been the ninth or tenth time. Explosive, to say the least. With the trial set to resume at 1.00pm, she only had the morning to decide what to do. Five hours before what was almost certain to be the most important moment of her career, if she had anything to do with it.
Her mind drifted back to that weird day three months earlier, when, returning from yet another car-crash of a court hearing, she had found Nigel Redmond, the scheming Clerk of Drake Chambers, lurking by her desk.
'Nigel. This is an unexpected pleasure. To what do I owe this great honour?'
'Eh bah gum lass, you look thoroughly hacked off.'
He did it every time they met. The crass mockery of her Yorkshire roots, evidently believing that it was amusing. But it wasn't.
'Another tough day on the coal-face of justice my dear, am I right?'
He had got that right at least.
'Stupid stupid police,' Maggie said. 'The two moronic cops on my case turn up all suited and booted and then suddenly one says to the other, I thought you were bringing the evidence file? Can you believe it? Of course, the judge goes ape-shit and re-schedules the trial way out to November. And now my slime-ball client goes free and I've just lost three days' work. Justice, don't make me laugh.'
Redmond was under no illusions as to why many of his learned colleagues had decided to practice law. For them, it was all about the remuneration, handsome and bountiful, and he liked to use that knowledge to his advantage.
'Well, don't worry young Maggie,' he had said in an obsequious tone, 'because I'll make sure you still get paid for today.'
And then, quite out of the blue, he had dropped the bombshell. 'And anyway, you're going to be in the money big-time because haven't I got a beauty of a brief for you. You're going to just love this.'
Then without a further word of explanation he had passed her Crown verses Alzahrani. Passed to Maggie Brooks, she of the exceptionally low-flying career, little miss distinctly average, not yet a QC despite nearly twenty years as a barrister. And if she was being honest, that wasn't just because she was a female working-class northerner swimming in a sea of white male public-school dickheads. That didn't help, but in occasional moments of honesty she forced herself to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, she really wasn't that good. But whether that was true or not was at this moment immaterial, because now, quite improbably, she was defending the notorious teenage terrorist. Finally she was in the spotlight, the big break she had always dreamed of but which until now had always eluded her. Later today she would be centre stage at the Old Bailey, and she was determined to do everything in her power to win. That was all that mattered, win at any cost, do or die, and then the big briefs would start to come in, when she could expect to clear at least one hundred and fifty grand a year, maybe more. Then she might be invited to apply to take silk. At last. Maggie Brooks QC. Or maybe it should be Maggie Bainbridge QC? Actually, she preferred her maiden name. It tripped off the tongue rather nicely, she thought.
But there was no time for idle daydreaming when she was due back in court at one o'clock sharp. Which meant she had only the morning in which to decide what to do about the Khan report. She perched her reading glasses on her nose and began to leaf through her scribbled notes, refreshing herself on his background, cobbled together from internet searches and a helpful article from the online edition of the Lancashire Evening Chronicle.
Dr Tariq Khan. British Pakistani, raised in Blackburn, Lancs. Grandfather arrived in the UK in the early fifties, worked as a bus driver, had four children including Khan's father Imran. Tariq born in 1970, eldest of four siblings. First member of his family to go to university, wins place at Cambridge to study physics. Graduated with first in 1993, then did PhD, subject unknown. Research scientist at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire for seven years. Father Imran active in community - Imam at local mosque.
He had done well, this Dr Khan, considering his modest background, and now it would appear he was occupying a very senior position at the Government Communications Headquarters up in Cheltenham. She turned to her laptop and clicked on the folder she had created just two days before, then opened an image file. The photograph was a typical end-of-conference group shot, showing Khan to be in his early-to-mid forties, bearded and smartly dressed in a three-piece suit but otherwise of unprepossessing appearance. It had been taken three or four years earlier in Denver in the US, at something called the Third International Symposium on Automatic Recognition Technologies. A further internet search had turned up the conference agenda, which listed him as Dr Tariq Khan, Head of Recognition Technologies, GCHQ, England. The subject of his presentation had been The Future of Automatic Facial Recognition in Civil Society. It looked as if he knew his stuff all right.
So the big question had to be, why in hell had he decided to write this damn report? A report, if she had interpreted its densely-written technical arguments correctly, that could blow the prosecution case out of the water? The obvious answer was that as a Muslim, he sympathised with the terrorist Alzahrani and this was an effort to see her freed. With a start, Maggie pulled herself up, recognising the lazy racial stereotyping thinking that it was. Tariq Khan was as English as she was and probably as proud a Lancastrian as she was a proud Yorkshire lass. Besides which, he worked for GCHQ for goodness sake, and he wouldn't have got through that door without the most intense scrutiny of his background and politics. So no, it had to be something else, surely?
The email had come in just three days earlier from an organisation calling itself British Solidarity for Palestine. She had found a website, poorly-designed and amateurish in construction, the home page stridently condemning Israel, the US and Britain for what it called their war crimes. There were a smattering of celebrity endorsements, the usual suspects, including, they claimed, the present Prime Minister Julian Priest. No surprise there, given his long-standing support for the cause, although it seemed unlikely that he would be involved with such an unprofessional outfit. She had asked Philip if he knew anything about them and he said he had never heard of them, his verdict being they were probably a bunch of wanky virtue-signalling sixth-formers jumping on a bandwagon. This, from the king of wanky virtue-signalling himself.
But whoever they were and whatever their motivation, there was little doubt in her mind that the report was genuine, and she found it hard to suppress her excitement. This was going to be the giant coup, the big high-profile victory against impossible odds, the win that would make her reputation. Then the work would surely come flooding in and with it, the fat fees and everything you could do with it. Things like dumping a cheating pig of a husband. And then maybe in a year or two she could take silk. God, she wanted that so badly.
Of course, she knew exactly what was the right thing to do next. She should tell the judge about the report, get the police to track down Dr Khan, call him as a witness and let the estimable British justice system take its course.
But she wasn't going to do any of that, because she had a much better
plan. Not entirely her own idea it was true, but brilliant nonetheless. For the final time, she checked that sentence in the email. No, she hadn't misread it. There it was, absolute dynamite, the phrase that she had carefully underlined in red pen.
We have evidence that the prosecution has had Khan's report since the start of the trial, perhaps earlier.
Perhaps earlier. She leaned back in her chair and smiled to herself. Just for a moment, she had forgotten about the crumpled credit card receipt in her pocket. And about her cheating husband, a man she was unsure if she had ever really loved. But sod him, she was on her way.
Chapter 2
The armoured Foxhound, still incongruously painted in its desert camouflage, was parked around sixty metres away, close enough to get a clear view of the suspect vehicle, a nondescript silver-grey Peugeot, but not too close to make them vulnerable should the car bomb choose to detonate. At least this time there had been a coded warning. It had taken the skeleton team of PSNI officers the good part of an hour to clear the immediate area. Even at four-thirty on a dank and misty April Saturday, the street had been busy with shoppers, each resolved to take full advantage of Easter weekend bargains by turning up in person rather than relying on the internet. The Explosives Ordnance Disposal team had arrived whilst the police were still on their loud-hailers repeating 'we have had a bomb warning, please clear the area. This is not a drill, this is not a drill' over and over again. Armed officers in flak jackets and cradling Heckler & Koch MP5SF semi-automatics were positioned every thirty metres or so, nervously scanning the horizon for an unseen enemy.
'Bloody hopeless sir, don't you think? Those PSNI lot I mean.'
Captain Jimmy Stewart took another draw on his cigarette before answering. 'Aye well Naomi, the problem is they've not yet come to terms with the fact that the troubles are back. They can't believe that Northern Ireland is going back to the seventies, who does? Nobody wants it, but the local politicians hope if they ignore it, it will just go away.'