Iqbal’s involvement in the plot, if there actually was one, was clear. Shahid’s wasn’t, at all, and the only evidence against him was the internet use at his flat during the period Iqbal had been staying with him. Jihadi websites had been visited, and encrypted emails exchanged – the encrypted emails being a fingerprint-clear proof of something amiss, since no one without a dark purpose would bother with the necessary weapons-strength secrecy. It seemed entirely obvious to some of the security services – Amir the Asian interrogator, and Clarke the tired heavy Special Branch man among them – that Shahid had nothing to do with whatever was being planned and that he was at worst a kind of useful idiot, willing to give shelter and accommodation to a man he knew was up to no good. To some others, including the MI5 officers who had been in charge of the initial surveillance, nobody could be that naive. His semi-jihadi past combined with his association with the terrorist Iqbal made it self-evident that he was a central member of the plot, and if there was little direct evidence that was nothing more than a sign that he was careful – in other words, the absence of evidence was an important and sinister piece of evidence.
‘Bullshit,’ said Amir. ‘Total bullshit. Catch-22. The fact that there’s nothing on him is proof that he’s a trained operative? Bullshit.’
‘He has the history,’ said the MI5 liaison.
‘No he doesn’t. He has the archaeology – more than ten years ago. So he went to Chechnya. Big deal. There’s nothing else here. There’s no form. Nothing from our people at the mosque, nothing on his record of travel, no pattern of any kind. He would have to be some weird kind of sleeper agent who does nothing for a decade. When he was in Chechnya, Al Qaeda didn’t exist. All bullshit.’
‘Until we find Iqbal Rashid, he’s not going anywhere,’ said the MI5 man. And that was where the situation rested. Shahid had been held in prison for ten days, and did not have to be charged for another eighteen.
83
‘I feel a little bit sick,’ said Matya. ‘What’s it called? Like being in a car. Or on a boat. Sick from the movement.’
‘Cierpiący na morską chorobę,’ said Zbigniew. ‘I don’t know what it’s called in English.’
They were on the London Eye, more than halfway up. Stepping onto the wheel had been, to Zbigniew’s surprise, slightly disconcerting: the implacable way it couldn’t be stopped or slowed. Matya, obviously feeling the same thing, put a hand above his elbow as they stepped on. That was good. Up they went in the clear capsule. They weren’t alone: a number of tourists – seven Japanese and a few southern Europeans – were in the same bubble. The Japanese were jockeying to take mobile-phone photographs of themselves and the view.
The city spread out around them and Zbigniew started by pretending to look at the views – because his real reason for being there was to be with Matya, and he wasn’t that bothered about anything else – and then found himself getting genuinely interested. He had worked in London for three years now but had no idea about most of what he was looking at. London was big and low in the middle, with a higher edge in both directions, like a gigantic saucer. North and south weren’t where he expected them to be and the patch of green, higher, but not much higher, say twenty metres above the river, three or four kilometres away, must be the Common. Zbigniew, who had no feelings about London that he was aware of, was nonetheless impressed. One thing about London: there was a lot of it.
The mobile phone thing had worked perfectly for Zbigniew. He waited for two hours: went home, checked his portfolio at the kitchen table, ate the beef stew which one of Piotr’s crew had cooked, and then, just as he thought he was going to have to take the initiative, the phone rang. The ringtone was ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley – which might mean that she was a girl who liked her music. Interesting. The number being shown on the screen was his number and it took him a moment to get his head around it: that meant not that he was calling himself but that Matya was calling him, i.e. calling herself, using his phone. The moment of confusion was useful because it meant he didn’t have to act confused.
‘Um, yes, who is this?’ said Zbigniew.
‘Who is that? Why do you have my mobile?’ said Matya.
‘Why do I have your mobile? Why do you have my mobile?’
They sorted it out from there. Bless Nokia for the popularity and ubiquity of the N60. Zbigniew knew that this was a moment to be gallant, and made no secret about the fact that it was all his fault, so he would make everything all right by bringing the phone to her, right now. So she would go to the pub about two hundred metres away from her and he would meet her there in about half an hour.
Zbigniew knew the pub, a cattle market just off the Common. He got there in twenty minutes and took up a position at the bar; she was on time.
‘Completely my fault,’ said Zbigniew, raising his hands. ‘A hundred per cent. Didn’t think, didn’t check.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter, thanks for bringing it back straight away,’ said Matya, who had changed out of her daytime jeans into a slimline dress which Zbigniew found he both wanted to look at and couldn’t bear to look at, at the same time. She really was lovely. He wished he could think of clever or funny things to say, but all he could come out with was ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘No,’ she said, but smiling, looking down and up, before adding, ‘Not tonight.’ And Zbigniew, understanding what that meant, felt a flash of real happiness for the first time in a long time. So they made a date for a week later, she left, and he floated home. Perfect. Could anything be more perfect?
Zbigniew thought long and hard about what to do with Matya on their first date together. Zbigniew’s sense of himself, in the privacy of his own mind, was that he was about as unromantic as it was humanly possible for a person to be. Matter-of-fact, practical, unemotional, temperate, sane. There were few activities which could not be approached as if they had a secret user’s manual. Attraction to the opposite sex and the need to find a mate were practical realities of life and it would be better if they were approached as such. Zbigniew had noticed, however, that this was not the way the world worked. Besides, something about Matya made him feel as if there were perhaps something in this idea of romance after all… And he knew for sure – he could detect – that the right way to treat her was as if she were special. She was not like other girls.