“Do we discount all possibility of a dirty bomb?” asked the balding lieutenant colonel. “They wouldn’t have to be very near to their target if they meant to detonate one of those. A few miles upwind would do it.”
“We’ve not found any trace of radioactive material near the Dersthorpe bungalow or in the Vauxhall Astra they were using,” said Whitten. “We made a point of checking that.”
“I’d put money on them using C4,” said Mackay. “It’s the ITS’s signature explosive and, as you gentlemen will be aware, you can buy most of the ingredients in the average high street. The question is: how are they planning to deliver it? A field mouse couldn’t get through the security surrounding that base.”
“Jean D’Aubigny,” said Liz. “She’s the key.”
“Go on,” said Jim Dunstan.
“I just can’t believe that Mansoor’s controllers would waste an asset like her on a pointless assault on a high-security installation. I stand by what I said before: she must have privileged information of some kind.”
But even as she said it, Liz was unsure that this was the case. Wasting operatives on hopeless suicide missions was an ITS speciality.
“Have your people got through the door of that Welsh school yet?” asked Mackay pointedly.
“Yes, they have. They’re e-mailing me a list of D’Aubigny’s contemporaries as soon as they can.”
“Right… They’ve rather taken their time about it, haven’t they?”
“It takes time,” replied Liz acidly.
As you’d know if you’d any real experience of such things, she might have added. Her colleagues had had to get a warrant signed, inform the local uniform, transport an Investigations team to mid-Wales, disarm the school’s BT Redline alarm system, and pick the locks of the front door and a filing cabinet-and that was before they came face to face with Price-Lascelles’ chaotic filing system.
“Frankly,” said Jim Dunstan, “I can’t see how the hell an investigation of this young woman’s school career is going to move things forwards. It seems to me that we’ve gathered all the intelligence we need. We know who we’re after and we know what they look like. We have a target, we have a motive, and we have a date. We have a counter-strategy and we have people in place to implement it. All we have to do now is wait, so why don’t you get some sleep, young lady?”
Not over-keen on your lot, Whitten had said about Jim Dunstan, and to begin with she had thought him mistaken in that respect. But the chain-smoking, baggy-eyed DS had been right. The old resentment lingered. Senior policemen, with their public face and their accountability, had long distrusted the state’s secret servants, and the fact that she was a woman probably further prejudiced the Deputy Chief Constable against her. It didn’t help either that the only other woman currently in the room, PC Wendy Clissold, was at that moment obediently carrying Don Whitten a cup of tea-white, one sugar.
Liz looked around her. The faces were friendly enough but the message from each of them was the same. This was the endgame, the point at which theory was translated into action. The cerebral stuff-the intelligence-gathering and analysis-was over. She had nothing further to contribute.
And she sensed something else. A muted but definite anticipation. The Army people, in particular, were like sharks. Twitchy with adrenalin. Smelling blood on the current. They wanted Mansoor and D’Aubigny to try and hit Marwell, she realised. They wanted the pair to dash themselves against its impenetrable wall of armed manpower. They wanted them dead.
A text message announced incoming mail from Judith Spratt.
Have school list for D’Aubigny’s leaving year. Checking now.
54
Denzil Parrish arrived back in West Ford knowing that an unpromising evening lay ahead. His mother had warned him well in advance that her new in-laws were not the easiest-going people she’d ever met-“uptight suburban control freaks,” in fact, was the expression she’d used-but she had also warned him that he was expected to put in some “serious quality time” with them, “and not go bunking off to the pub every night.”
So Denzil had agreed to put a brave face on it and do his best. The fact that his stepfather’s parents were digging in for a whole week had only been sprung on him once he himself had agreed to come down from Tyneside as soon as term was ended, and the subterfuge still rankled. His absence today until well after sunset had been part of the punishment he had chosen to inflict. Deep down, however, he understood his mother’s predicament, and was forced to admit that since her remarriage she’d been happier than he could remember her, and since Jessica had been born she’d been almost… well, girlish, he supposed, although it had to be said that this was by no means a desirable attribute in a forty-year-old parent. Whatever, she was smiling again, and for that Denzil was grateful.
Braking the Accord a short distance beyond the gate, he backed into the driveway. Halfway down the incline he braked again, and got out of the car to unlock the garage and remove the kayak from the roof-rack. It had been, in its way, a fantastic day. He’d never thought of himself as the lone operator type, but there was something about Norfolk in winter-the uncompromising solitude, the vast rain-charged skies-which accorded with his mood. On the Methwold Fen Relief Drain he’d seen a marsh harrier, a very rare bird indeed these days. He’d heard the call first-the shrill kwee, kwee damped by the wet wind. A moment later he’d seen the hawk itself, hanging almost casually on a wing before plummeting into the reeds and rising an instant later with a screaming moorhen between its talons. Nature red in tooth and claw. The sort of moment you remembered for ever.
A moment not at odds, in a weird sort of way, with the helicopters that, at intervals, he’d seen hovering and whispering in the northern distance. What had that been about? Some sort of exercise? One of the helicopters had come close enough for him to see its military markings.
Rolling up the garage door, he hauled the kayak inside and shoved it up into the rafters. Then, parking the car and closing the garage door behind him, he returned up the ramp and climbed the balustraded stone steps to the front door. If nothing else, his mother’s remarriage had certainly given the family a leg-up in the world, property-wise. Having pulled off his wet waterproofs and hung them to drip in the front hall, he found his mother in the kitchen, pausing from the preparation of a leg of lamb and the boiling of a kettle to open a jar of prune-based sludge for the baby’s dessert. Jessica herself, meanwhile, temporarily at peace with the world, was lying on her back on a rug on the floor, sucking her toes. With his mother and half-sister stood a uniformed police officer.
The officer was smiling, and Denzil recognised him as Jack Hobhouse. A solid middle-aged man holding a peaked cap bearing the insignia of the Norfolk Constabulary, he had been to the house several times before when Denzil had been at home-most recently to advise on a new alarm system.
“Denzil, love, Sergeant Hobhouse has been warning us about something. Apparently there are a couple of terrorist-type people on the loose. Not near here, but they’re armed, and they’ve apparently…” Reaching down in response to a sudden sharp cry from Jessica, she gathered up the child, arranged her over her left shoulder, and started patting her back.
“Apparently…?” prompted Denzil.
“They’ve killed a couple of people up on the north coast,” she said as Jessica, burping, released a milky posset down the back of her mother’s expensive black cardigan. “There was that whole thing about the man who was found shot in that car park.”
“Fakenham,” said Denzil, regarding his mother’s back with fastidious horror. “I saw something about it in the local paper. They’re looking for a British woman and a Pakistani man, aren’t they?”