‘All those people,’ said Katra. ‘It’s terrible.’
‘What’s terrible?’ said Liam, who had walked in and was bouncing a football.
‘Not inside,’ said Shepherd, pointing at the ball, ‘I’ve told you before.’
Liam picked it up and hugged it to his chest. ‘What are you watching?’
‘The news,’ said Shepherd. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’
‘Cheesy scrambled eggs,’ said Liam.
‘Is that all you ever eat?’
‘I like it.’
‘I’m not sure it’s good for you. Too much cholesterol.’
‘What’s cholesterol?’
‘Fat. And too much is bad for you.’
‘There’s fat in bacon and you eat bacon sandwiches all the time. And coffee’s bad for you, too. That’s what Mummy used to say.’
‘She was probably right,’ agreed Shepherd. ‘What about some fruit? Or muesli?’
‘Muesli’s rabbit food,’ said Liam.
‘Cheesy scrambled eggs on toast,’ said Katra. ‘And I’ll use wholemeal bread.’ She smiled. ‘Once in a blue moon won’t hurt him.’
Shepherd grinned back. ‘Yeah, but he has it every day. I’m surprised he’s not bored with it.’
Liam sat down at the kitchen table and put the ball under his feet. ‘Are we going to the park, Dad?’
‘Sure,’ said Shepherd, ‘but let me watch this now.’ He leaned against the counter and sipped his coffee. On the screen, paramedics with stretchers were rushing towards the wrecked hotel.
‘Why do they blow things up, Dad?’
‘It’s a tough question, Liam.’
‘What do they want, though, the men who did it?’
Another tough question, thought Shepherd. It had always been so much easier with the IRA. Their aims were clear. They wanted the British out, and a united Ireland. But the aims of Muslim terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda, were a lot harder to pin down. ‘They want to frighten people,’ he said.
‘But why?’
Katra slotted slices of bread into the toaster and cracked eggs into a bowl.
‘It’s difficult to explain,’ said Shepherd.
‘But why would they blow up a hotel?’
‘Because they think if they scare people enough they’ll get what they want.’
‘But what do they want?’
Shepherd sat down at the kitchen table opposite Liam. ‘Okay, part of it is about Iraq. You know we went to war against Iraq?’
‘Yes.’
‘And our soldiers are still there, with American and Australian soldiers – soldiers from all over the world.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, some people don’t want the soldiers to be in Iraq. They want them to leave. And they think that if they scare people enough, the governments will tell their soldiers to leave.’
‘But the people they killed aren’t soldiers.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s not fair.’
Liam was right. But much of what went on in the world had nothing to do with fairness. Shepherd had seen that at first hand as an SAS trooper in Afghanistan and every day on the streets as a police officer. ‘It’s easier to kill members of the public than it is to kill soldiers,’ he said.
‘Because they don’t have guns?’
‘Partly. And partly because ordinary people don’t expect to be attacked. Soldiers and policemen do.’
‘Are we okay in London?’ asked Liam. ‘They won’t do anything here again, will they?’
Shepherd had always tried to be truthful with his son. He’d never been the sort of parent who perpetuated the myths of the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas. He was happy to go along with Sue when she’d slipped a pound coin under Liam’s pillow in exchange for a milk tooth, but he’d always felt uncomfortable when she’d pretended that the Christmas presents had come from a man in a red suit who’d crawled down the chimney. When Liam was seven, he’d come home from school one day and said he’d been told by a classmate that Father Christmas wasn’t real. Sue had said that Santa Claus was hard at work with the elves at the North Pole. She’d turned to Shepherd for support, but he had pulled a face and walked away. A lie was a lie, and he’d promised himself that he would never lie to his family. His entire undercover life was spent lying, and he didn’t want to bring it home with him, even if it meant bursting the occasional bubble. ‘They might try,’ he said. ‘They’re bad men and they do bad things. But there’s a lot of people working to stop them. And the chance of you or me or anyone we know being hurt is so small that you mustn’t worry about it.’
There were two solemn newsreaders on screen, a pretty blonde girl and a man in his late forties, hair greying at the temples. Both had perfect teeth and a movie-star tan. The man was recapping earlier terrorist incidents – Madrid, Bali, New York.
‘But if they did do something, people would die, wouldn’t they?’
Katra stirred Liam’s eggs and cheese. The toaster pinged, and she pulled out the toast.
‘Maybe,’ said Shepherd, ‘but we can’t let that worry us. If we’re scared all the time the terrorists have won. That’s what they want, to scare us. So if we aren’t scared, they can’t win.’
‘But you’re going to help catch them, aren’t you?’
‘I’m going to try.’
‘And they’ll go to prison, right?’
‘Sure.’
‘And you’ll get a medal?’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Maybe.’
There were more images on the screen. A Sydney hospital with ambulances unloading the injured. A voiceover saying that at least a hundred people had been killed but that the final death toll was likely to be much higher. Shepherd wondered what sort of men would set off a bomb to kill civilians. He could understand combat: man against man, weapon against weapon. Terrible things happened in wars, but it was always soldier against soldier. He’d killed in combat, but the men who had died might just as easily have killed him. He’d been shot, too, taken a sniper’s bullet in the shoulder in Afghanistan and only survived because of the skill of an SAS medic and the fact that a chopper had been nearby. Shepherd felt no hatred for the guy who’d shot him: Shepherd had been doing his job and so had the sniper. Shepherd had been trained in the use of explosives, but only in military situations. He knew how to place a shaped charge to destroy a bridge or bring down a building, and he knew how to handle grenades. But if he had ever been ordered to plant a bomb that served no purpose other than to kill civilians, he would have refused, no matter what the circumstances.
Katra put down a plate of scrambled eggs and cheese on toast in front of Liam and he attacked it enthusiastically. ‘Chew it properly,’ said Shepherd.
‘It’s scrambled eggs,’ said Liam. ‘You can’t chew scrambled eggs.’
‘And don’t talk with your mouth full.’
‘What would you like, Dan?’ asked Katra.
‘Just toast, please,’ said Shepherd. The newsreaders were back on screen. The woman was talking via a video link to a so-called terrorism expert, a balding, bespectacled academic in a turtleneck sweater who was trying to explain the aims and objectives of the various Muslim extremist groups around the world. To Shepherd, it was obvious: they wanted to kill as many Westerners as possible. They wanted to provoke a backlash against Muslims so that they could point the finger at the West and say, ‘See? We told you they hated us.’ The West was in an impossible situation. If it did nothing, the deaths would continue. But in invading Iraq, in locking people up without trial, it was playing into the hands of the enemy. It was a no-win situation for which Shepherd had no solution. That was for the politicians to work out. Shepherd was a policeman: his job was to uphold law and order. It was for politicians to solve the insoluble, but most of those he saw on television didn’t have the intellectual skills necessary to programme a video recorder, never mind broker a peace with Islamic fundamentalists.