I walked back to the cleaning lady and asked whether she’d been in the day before and whether the office had been staffed.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It was very busy yesterday. It was hard to get my work done.’
I reassured her a bit, took her name, Awa Shambir, and her details and told her that she might as well move onto her next job since I didn’t think this particular office was going to re-open.
‘Friend of your mum’s?’ asked Lesley as we watched the lady neatly stow her cleaning gear and collect her personal things.
‘Don’t think so,’ I said. My mum doesn’t know every cleaner in London, just the Sierra Leoneans, most of the Nigerians and that Bulgarian contingent she’s been working with in King’s Cross. ‘Remind me to run her name when we get a moment.’
‘If you’re suspicious, we should stop her now,’ said Lesley.
She’d handled her gear like a professional, but I don’t know any cleaners who’d go to work in an expensive hijab like she’d been wearing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We need to get back to the tower. This is his legitimate front organisation. If he’s shut it down it means he either doesn’t need it any more or after today it might be a security risk.’
‘Hence all the missing computers,’ said Lesley.
‘Whatever he’s planning, I think he’s doing it today or tonight.’
I felt weirdly panicky all the way back across the river, and through the vile traffic around Elephant and Castle. But I couldn’t work out why.
‘Somebody tried to kill us a couple of days ago,’ said Lesley when I mentioned it. ‘I’m amazed we’re not on psychiatric medical leave.’
‘That which does not kill us,’ I said, ‘has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.’
Lesley said she was glad to hear it but she was putting more reliance on the fact that we’d been authorised to deploy with tasers in any Falcon operation. She’d picked them up from the Folly on her way back.
Lesley had also called Nightingale, who was still stuck in Essex guarding Varvara Sidorovna, and he said he’d talk to DCI Duffy. Bromley MIT could follow up on the office.
The council work vans were still in the car park when we got back.
‘You keep an eye on them while I get the go bag,’ I said.
‘Are you expecting trouble?’ asked Lesley.
‘Just want to be on the safe side,’ I said. I wanted my Metvest, if only for the psychological comfort. See, I thought as I waited for the lift, someone tries to kill you and suddenly you’re all cautious.
Emma Wall, looking very cheerful for once, stepped out of the lift when the doors opened — she practically jumped when she saw me.
‘Hello, Peter,’ she said. ‘I’m just going out to the shops. Do you want anything? I can pick you something up. Where’s Lesley?’
‘Outside,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ said Emma. ‘See you.’ And half ran out of the door, without waiting for a reply to her shopping offer.
Definitely drugs, I thought as I rode up in the lift. That’s what brung our fallen princess low — definitely drugs.
Toby started barking as soon as he heard the key in the lock and stayed barking as I suddenly paused before unlocking. Emma’s flat had been sealed with one of County Gard’s shiny steel doors. Could she have left or been evicted? But she’d said that she was just going out to the shops. And that was fast work for a company whose office was currently empty.
I finished opening the door and ignored Toby as he bounced eagerly around my legs. I grabbed the go bag and took it back out onto the landing where Toby did his best to climb inside. I pulled out my mobile and speed-dialled Lesley.
‘Is Emma with you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She’s gone to the shops.’
‘If you see her, grab her and don’t let those vans leave before I get down there.’
Lesley said she thought I was becoming unhinged, but she agreed to park the new Asbo across the culvert so they couldn’t escape.
Your Metvest comes in two bits, the knife- and bullet-resistant panels and a tough fabric sheath — the vest bit. The plain sheath was for plain clothes, but this time I wanted my multi-pocketed and comforting blue uniform vest with POLICE on the back in fluorescent letters. Once I’d distributed my kit about my person, I walked over to the newly installed County Gard security door and, pausing only to turn my phone off, blew the lock out with a fireball.
Then I had to wait about two minutes for the metal to cool off, which made me wonder whether I could get Varvara Sidorovna to teach me the formae for that freeze-ray she kept flinging at me.
Finally I used the end of my baton to prise the door open and, keeping the baton extended and ready, I stepped inside the flat. If she’d really moved out or been evicted then she certainly believed in travelling light. The flat was dirty in the way I remembered from the last time I lived with a bunch of male coppers, not squalid but unkempt with dirt accumulating in the corners. My mum wouldn’t have tolerated it. In the bedroom, underwear hung halfway out of drawers, the duvet was rumpled and the pillows had fallen on the floor. The living room was nasty with a filled ashtray acting as a centrepiece for a stained coffee table — no obvious signs of paraphernalia, I noticed.
Out in the hallway of the flat Toby sneezed, raising a little cloud of tan-coloured dust. I hadn’t noticed him follow me in.
Dust covered half the hallway and was concentrated in front of the door of a storage cupboard to the left of the front door. I could see where heavy boots had ground the dust into the imitation wood flooring.
‘Many men have passed this way, Toby,’ I said and remembered Stephen’s complaint about the drilling. ‘Carrying heavy DIY equipment.’
Stromberg had designed Skygarden to be supported by nine big pillars that ran up the height of the tower. He’d tried to keep them from intruding into his nice rectilinear flats, but four of the flats on every level ended up with the rounded circumference in what was supposed to be their bathroom. Stromberg’s solution was to pretend that he’d always intended the bathrooms to be the size of a telephone box and build a ‘cupboard space’ around the curved side of the pillar.
I think I must have subconsciously known what I was going to find, because I found myself opening the cupboard door very carefully. When I saw what was inside I stopped breathing.
A grid of holes had been drilled into the concrete of the support pillar and then stuffed with a material that looked exactly like grey Plasticine. From their squidgy ends protruded grey cylinders which sprouted wires which were neatly gathered and fed down into a grey container the size and shape of cashbox that had been securely duct-taped to the pillar.
I wondered what would happen if I just yanked all the detonators out at once. Then I noticed a yellow post-it note that had fallen to the floor below the box. I picked it up and read, This device has been fitted with counter measures. Please do not tamper, as being blown up often offends.
19
It was the utter brazenness that frightened me. Whoever had planted the explosives hadn’t been worried about anyone seeing them. Which meant what? That they assumed nobody would break the County Gard seals? Or, worse, because they’d detonate too soon for anyone to find them?
I couldn’t remember a single step of any procedure relating to the discovery of a bomb, but I was pretty certain that step one wasn’t hyperventilating.
No, step one was to scream for help, but in a measured and sensible fashion. And don’t use your mobile or airwave, in case the RF set off the detonator. Since Emma had walked out of her flat with just the clothes she was wearing, the first thing I did was check her landline — not a wireless handset thank god — and found it had a dialling tone. I punched 999 and identified myself to CCC who asked me to confirm where I was exactly and that a bomb was on the premises.