There was no way I was admitting this to the doctors. And anyway, confused as I felt, I knew this was not exactly the same as last time.
Zoe checked her message. ‘Pablo,’ she grinned ruefully, her face lighting up.
‘Ah, young love. Don’t let me keep you from Skype.’
‘If I can still speak after all the vino. My Spanish is still crap, though my swear words are coming on a storm.’
At the door, Zoe swung her wicker basket onto her arm like Little Red Riding Hood – though I imagined it was more Penélope Cruz she was channelling.
‘Let me know what they say, Claudie.’ She kissed me and took my hands in hers. ‘The doctors.’
‘I will.’
‘And talk to me, won’t you, if it gets really bad again.’
‘OK,’ I mumbled, trying to pull away.
‘And promise me one thing.’
‘What?’ but I already knew what Zoe was going to say.
‘Promise me you’ll call Will. I think you may need—’ she trailed off.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She frowned. ‘It just worries me. You being alone again.’
I reached around her to open the front door. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I like being alone. And I’ll think about it.’
But right now, I had more pressing things on my mind.
WEDNESDAY 19TH JULY SILVER
Silver woke feeling hungover, which was ridiculous because he hadn’t had a drink for five years, three months, four weeks and – well. His fanatical counting of the days AA-style had dissipated a little in the past year or so, but old habits did die hard, it appeared.
Five minutes after arriving at work, Malloy called him in; bantered about the squash tournament briefly, and ‘that ponce Lonsdale’, and then asked Silver to head up part of what was now being referred to as Operation Nightingale.
‘You’ve probably heard, Al-Qaeda’s little friends have put up this new website since the explosion, celebrating the death toll. It’s a fucking travesty.’ The top of Malloy’s bullet-shaped head was practically quivering with outrage. ‘But the fucking knobs who run the worldwide web say they have no jurisdiction to shut it down. And the Muslims are not taking the rap for this, though they’re having a damn good laugh about it, so Counter Terrorism are about to pass it over. Got enough on their plate apparently; they’ll give us one dedicated officer to work with us and that’s it. And now we’ve got this fucking stupid “Purity” pony to deal with that’s been leaked to the press.’ Malloy flung a typewritten letter onto the desk in front of Silver; he scanned it quickly.
To those who perpetuate the suffering in this world:
It is time you saw that things must change, that we cannot continue ad nauseam to ruin our planet, to never take the blame. We need to purify: we are purifying for you all. Be warned, Berkeley Square is only the beginning.
‘Nutters, no? Any other developments?’ Silver folded the letter and sat opposite his boss.
‘I’ve just found out that there was some sort of tip-off on the Friday morning; some bird rang to say there was going to be a “major incident southeast of Oxford Street”. If the press get hold of that, we are for the fucking high jump.’
‘Who dealt with the call?’
‘It was passed over to SO15, but the operator thought it was a hoax. Said the woman was slightly hysterical and she thought she was a crazy. And fucking Explosives are taking forever, and they’re so reticent to actually confirm anything, it’s doing my head in.’ Malloy fiddled with his Police Benevolent Fund paper-clip box in a way that suggested he wanted to slam it through the wall. He was highly agitated; more so than Silver remembered seeing him. ‘The bank wants to sue, the building firm are terrified they’re going to lose everything and British Gas are cacking themselves. Plus we’ve hardly managed to retrieve any CCTV footage at all, surprise fucking surprise. So far only one of the cameras that survived the blast seems to have even been switched on. I wonder why the fuck we bother really.’
Malloy dropped the paper-clip box and opened a DVD package on his desk, fiddling with his laptop for a minute, his stubby fingers clumsy on the keys, swearing quietly. ‘Christ. Technology. Makes me feel prehistoric. Right, here we go.’
The picture was visible now.
‘See, this little thing arrives at the Academy around 6.47.’
Silver watched a short teenage girl in a beanie hat enter via the front stairs, holding a gym bag. At 6.49 another taller woman, using a stick, walking as quickly as her limp allowed, came out and, standing at the top of the Academy stairs, made two calls, scanning the square as she did so. Then she went back into the building.
‘Tessa Lethbridge possibly? TBC. About five minutes later, the girl comes back outside, apparently to have a cigarette. Then this courier bike arrives,’ Malloy pointed at the screen, ‘and hands her this package; she goes back inside at 7.03.’
Silver found the flickering footage made him feel almost seasick.
‘Now look.’ At 7.08 a white car drove up, an old Golf, stopping outside the Academy, the driver apparently on a mobile phone.
‘Who’s that?’
‘No fucking reg of course, from this angle.’ Malloy cracked his knuckles. ‘But we need to identify him.’
Two minutes later a couple of builders in hard hats and yellow high-visibility jackets walked past the Academy, presumably heading for the Hotel Concorde building site in the adjacent corner.
On the other side of the road, a figure in a full-length burqa pushed an empty pushchair to the edge of the pavement, then began to cross the road. Silver found he was riveted despite his slight nausea. A car passed through frame, then a black Range Rover. The figure in the Golf saw the girl come out of the Academy doors again, holding up a hand in greeting as she ran down the stairs to the pavement, and then a figure follow behind her, but before their identity was revealed, a double-decker bus pulled in front of the camera, obscuring any view.
Another thirty seconds: and the picture went white.
‘What the hell—’ Silver sat back, intensely frustrated, as if he’d just missed the end of his favourite soap opera.
‘Exactly. What the hell? The only people visible to us in the square and they hardly look like your typical group of fundamentalists do they?’
‘Except burqa-girl.’
They replayed the video. This time Silver noticed the way the girl smoking a cigarette outside of the Academy, who had accepted the courier’s parcel, was pacing back and forth as she waited. He watched again as the woman in the burqa seemed to react to something behind her.
‘Of course, burqa-girl might be totally unlinked.’ Malloy scratched his head, his grey crew-cut like burnt stubble in a field. ‘It’s just she seems obvious to me. Why’s the pushchair empty? It’s just a foil, surely. But Counter Terrorism disagree. And upstairs, they’re so fucking paranoid about inciting religious hatred at the moment, they won’t say boo to a goose, which don’t help.’
‘But then,’ Silver rubbed his face wearily, ‘there’s no actual evidence from any of that, that any of them are directly linked to the explosion.’
‘No, of course. But what the fuck were they up to?’ Malloy slammed the laptop lid shut with a thump. ‘Strike ’em off the list, and I’ll be happy. We need to find all of them: the courier bike and the bloke in the car, burqa-girl, and the dancer. And fucking pronto. Christ, Joe,’ he stood up and then sat again. ‘We’ve got fourteen dead, the fucking world’s