I travelled the tube. I wandered the stations. I imagined. I looked at the crowds as the train doors opened. Now. I looked at the tired workers, the school-kids, the elderly, the mothers with their children. I looked at the faces of confused tourists. Now. I stared at suitcases. I looked at the glass and metal. Now. Sometimes I would see a woman I liked. I would find myself waiting until she got off. But that was wrong. Do it now.
On the streets I stopped in doorways and hesitated at crossings and stood still in places where people do not stand still. I dropped my pace, changed my perspective. I slipped through the city.
I began to imagine that I was being followed. This caused me a gentle, grim pleasure. I did not really believe that I was being followed. Not really. But I could turn suddenly in the street and see someone veer. I could glance behind me at a pedestrian crossing and find someone who had been in the same tube carriage. As I hesitated at a corner, turned back on myself, I could see faces that registered surprise, or which hid it with an unnatural blankness. Sometimes I saw people in windows. In cars. Parked vans, workmen.
One morning as I sat at my desk in the British Library I looked up suddenly and saw something — a figure — slip behind a bookcase at the edge of the reading room, not far from where I was. There was something about the movement, something jerky, which made me think it entertainingly suspicious. I stood up and walked over there. There was a man, a young man, consulting a publishing catalogue in a narrow aisle. I considered him for a moment. He seemed lost in concentration. But I noticed that his eyes were not moving, and that the little finger of his left had was bouncing up and down on the page. Like a signal. I moved around him, consulted volumes on one side of him and the other. I went to the next aisle and stood opposite him, our heads level through the shelves. He never once looked at me. Never once. I drifted back to my desk. I wrote out a description of him. I looked up again and he was gone. Playing his role to perfection, he disappeared completely. I never saw him again.
Eventually, I paused long enough in my plotting to write a two page pitch. It fizzed like a fuse.
I did nothing for a couple of days. I slept. I looked at my flat. I shaved.
I called Stanley from a phone box in Muswell Hill.
— I’ve done something. I’m not sure you’ll approve.
— Oh good.
— Are you free? When are you free? This week.
He didn’t want to see me. He tried to put me off to the following week, or the week after that.
— Stanley.
— What?
— Make it this week. It’s big.
— What’s big?
— I don’t want to tell you about it on the phone.
— What are you talking about?
— I’ll meet you in that pub. Same as last time. Tomorrow. 2pm. Be there Stanley.
— What? Oh … drat … all right. Well, make it 1.30 will you?
— Alright. 1.30. You won’t regret it.
— What’s wrong with your voice?
— What do you mean?
— You sound like one of the Mitchell brothers. Do you have a cold?
— No. Yes. I have a cold. Tomorrow. 1.30.
I sipped my tea and looked out of my window. I could hear the high whipping of a helicopter, but the sky was just blue.
I left the flat in plenty of time, carrying everything in a rucksack. Though all Stanley really needed in order to make a deal was the two page précis, I wanted to show him — I wanted, I suppose, to impress him — with the background work already completed. I had copious notes on the viability of radioactive material and the explosives best suited to efficient dispersal. The internet had helped me with that. I’d studied the requirements for the safe storage of these materials and the procedures necessary for their handling. I had sample contracts from two self-storage places. I had detailed specifications of black cabs, London buses, tube trains, golf buggies. I had copious notes on the operating structure of the London 2012 organising committee; as well as, of course, detailed plans of the Olympic site and its surroundings. I had diagrammatic representations of air traffic, sea traffic, road traffic into and out of the city. I had city maps of Cologne, Cairo, Islamabad, Kabul, Damascus, New York and Birmingham. Train timetables, route maps. I had scene sketches for four major set pieces; biographical notes for nearly a dozen characters; timelines and calendars; motivation flowcharts; psychological frameworks. I had …
They took me at Finsbury Park tube station. Very smart. Very quick. No one will have noticed, I’m certain. No one. Slight scuffle near the newspaper seller. As soon as you turned to look there was nothing. Just the door of an unmarked van sliding shut. Must have imagined it.
— Can you breathe OK in there? Clive? Can you hear me?
— Yes, I said.
Something solid, hard and fast hit me in the stomach.
— What about now?
Motion and imperfect blindness and I had the sense of always turning corners and my fear was suffocation and there were hands on me and a hood of some sort and my clothes were gone and my last thought before I blacked out was for myself not others and it was the thought that death might take a long time.
If you know nothing, you will make something up. If they tell you nothing, you will create something. If they leave you alone in the silence, you will give them names and faces and they will tower over you in the dark like mountains. Guilt is always available. It just needs the stimulus of punishment to make itself known.
I was in a cell. Windowless, with a bunk that came down from the wall, a toilet that came out from the wall, a door set into the wall. It was all wall. Whitewash. The lights were set into the ceiling. There was a plastic bottle of water. The clothes were a pair of outsized boxer shorts, tracksuit bottoms, a much washed tee shirt, a sweatshirt. They all smelled of disinfectant. No labels, no marks. A pair of sandals. I looked at the lights. They were protected by a layer of Perspex or something cloudy. All the surfaces were hard but smooth. There were no edges. There was a peephole in the door. There was no handle. No hinges. The bunk had a plastic mattress, about an inch thick, and a grey blanket. No pillow.
These things do not matter.
My chief hope at first was not for my release or for an explanation, but that they were the police and not something else.
I wondered who would miss me. If anyone would miss me.
Stanley, obviously. Stanley would miss me. He would call. He would know something was wrong. He would try to track me down. He would poke around. He would visit the flat. Call Rosemary. Get in touch with Mr Malik. Eventually he would contact the police and report me missing. Stanley would know what to do.
They waited until I was asleep. Then the door clattered open and there were three men surrounding me — all talking, it seemed to me, at once. I woke too quickly, and I could not take in what they were saying. I am told that this was the point at which I signed a form stating that I knew and understood that I had been arrested, that my rights had been explained and that I had indicated that I understood them, that the police officers who arrested me had identified themselves as such, that I had suffered no ill treatment, that I was content with the conditions of my detention, and that I was willing and ready to cooperate fully. I remember none of that. All I remember is that two of the men were wearing police shirts, Met ties, pressed trousers, shiny black shoes. My relief was physical. My breathing changed. I may have wept.