‘Yes. It would take too long and we don’t have the manpower,’ agreed Pearson. ‘What I can do is double the number of officers patrolling the gates and the stands, and I can insert more plain-clothes officers into the crowd. Obviously we’ll be closely monitoring the CCTV cameras too, but we have no descriptions of these jihadis and it’s very likely we won’t spot them until they start something.’
‘The Home Secretary will wish to know what the law and order implications are if the match is cancelled at this short notice.’ It was the Head of Counter-Terrorism at the Home Office.
‘It won’t surprise you, or her, that cancelling the match at this late hour will create plenty of problems on the street. Even if we announce cancellation now there will still be hundreds arriving in a short space of time, and we may have some violence when they find out the match is cancelled. The later we leave it to announce cancellation, the worse it will be. That’s why need to decide now, I’m afraid.’
DG spoke again: ‘Liz, what’s your view of things? Do you have a recommendation?’
Liz was drawing in her breath to say that she thought the only safe option was to cancel the match, when Pearson’s office door opened and a young uniformed policeman came in, looking nervous. Without saying a word he handed Liz a slip of paper. It read, Most urgent call for you. She started to shake her head, but something in the young officer’s eyes made her change her mind.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, leaning towards the speakerphone. ‘I’ve just been told there’s a very urgent call for me. It may be relevant so I think I’d better take it.’
Liz was gone less than five minutes. When she came back into the room she walked straight up to the table and, still standing, leant towards the phone. ‘I apologise for the interruption,’ she said. ‘You were asking my view a moment ago and I was about to recommend cancellation. But as a result of the phone conversation I’ve just had, I can now confidently recommend that we should let the match go ahead.’
As she paused to catch her breath, Pearson broke in. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I’ve just been speaking to the lady who lives next door to Zara’s mother. Zara was at the house early last night, before he went to the warehouse to collect the weapons.’
‘Go on.’ It was DG’s voice.
‘The neighbour told me that Mrs Atiyah is away, but when Mrs Atiyah told her she’d be gone for a few days she didn’t say anything about anyone coming to stay. Yet the neighbour swears there are people in the house – she says she can hear them through the wall. And she actually saw one of them yesterday. It was a young man.’
Liz paused. No one spoke. ‘I think they’ve got to be the jihadis. And they’re still there now.’
Chapter 60
Liz had always looked forward to Christmas and enjoyed it, but not this year. She and Martin had planned to spend it in Paris, but after the funeral service and the day spent removing her belongings from Martin’s flat, Paris was the last place she wanted to spend any more time, let alone the holidays.
She’d gone instead to Bowerbridge, her childhood home. Her mother and Edward Treglown, her mother’s partner, had been doing their best to help her come to terms with Martin’s death and she didn’t want to hurt their feelings by refusing to join them for Christmas.
She had arrived on Christmas Eve afternoon and they had gone to the midnight service at the village church. Liz had been brought up an Anglican but she no longer believed in any sort of God, though she knew that the moral principles she tried to live by were firmly rooted in her Anglican upbringing. And in fact, the church service with its familiar words, its music and the carols she knew so well had proved oddly soothing.
Afterwards they had walked back through the estate that her father had managed for the then owners. She’d played there with the children of the big house when she was quite young and she knew every track and path. It was a clear starry night and frost was beginning to settle on the fields. So bright was the moon that they hardly needed their torches. As she walked, she thought about everything that had happened to her since the previous Christmas and wondered, not for the first time, whether the time had come to quit and find another job.
She had stayed on for Christmas Day, worried that the sadness she couldn’t disguise might spoil the day, but by the evening she had eaten enough and drunk enough of Edward’s favourite burgundy to dull the pain and they had spent a pleasant evening dozing in front of the fire and the TV. Then on Boxing Day they had joined a big lunch party at some neighbour’s, where blessedly no one present had known anything about Liz’s relationship with Martin or about his death, so all she had to do was dodge the usual questions about her job.
She left the next day, promising to try and come down for New Year’s Eve, though she knew that both her mother and Edward understood that she wasn’t going to make it. Wherever she was, Liz knew she was going to be in pain, and she thought it best to suffer alone – why spoil any more of the holidays for everybody else?
After an aimless evening in her flat, she went back to work the next day. She was used to the sense of anticlimax that came at the end of an operation, whatever the outcome, but this time grief redoubled her deflation. Yet she knew that immersion in work would be the one thing to get her through the coming days, so she was glad to be back at her desk.
The office was quiet, virtually empty of staff on her floor, though in pockets round the building people were working as hard as ever. She rang the A4 Control Room to say thank you for all their efforts in following Zara on his anti-surveillance route to Eccles and the lorry from Harwich. Wally Woods answered.
‘Happy New Year,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever have a holiday?’
‘My work is my leisure,’ he responded with a snort. ‘We’re in the middle of another drama now.’
On her return from Manchester, Liz had filed a brief report but knew she would have to supplement it. Not that there was much to add.
On that morning in Manchester when a half-conscious Peggy, just before surgery, had through sheer stubbornness insisted word must get through to Liz that Mrs Donovan had phoned the Thames House switchboard, it hadn’t taken Einstein to see the link with Atiyah. Liz had called Mrs Donovan straight away.
She had expected a call that early would wake the old lady up, but quite the opposite proved to be the case. ‘About time someone rang,’ Maggie Donovan had said irritably. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep. I’ve been waiting for hours.’ Then the old lady, still sharp as a tack, had told Liz about the visitors next door, and how Mrs Atiyah was away and hadn’t said anything about people coming to stay.
Within half an hour, still in the moonless dark, a dozen armed police had filled the terraced street, blocking each end, climbing over garden walls and finally simultaneously breaking down the front and back doors and charging into the house. Inside they’d found the five associates of Mika Atiyah asleep on inflatable mattresses on the sitting room and bedroom floors. Caught off guard, they had been taken into custody without resistance. When they were questioned, they had all protested, claiming that they had come to Manchester to go to the football match with their friends. It hadn’t taken much of a search of the house to find the little pile of tickets for the match, lying on top of a cupboard. But when they were asked to explain why the tickets were all for different parts of the ground, they became less vocal.
After it was discovered that each of them carried a Yemeni passport, even though they spoke in a variety of British regional accents and not one of them could understand the interpreter who was summoned to speak to them in Arabic, they’d refused to say anything at all. Not that that had helped them for long in concealing their identities, once the detailed inquiries were completed. They were all now in prison in Manchester, as was Mika Atiyah, on a variety of charges under the Counter-Terrorism Act.