He had to make sure that there was no second tape. Would she have gone straight to the police?
He would have to confess to his Friends, like he always did, and he would just tell them they needed to get the disc off Jennifer and search for a tape. That was all. They had always done what he asked, hadn’t they? They had always given him everything he wanted, they would do so again, wouldn’t they?
And so he picked up the phone and dialled. It was still only just after five o’clock.
By five-fifteen a specialist team was on the case. Two men in a British Telecom van arrived to check out Jennifer Stone’s Richmond home at just past six o’clock, only minutes after she’d arrived there herself.
They could see there was someone inside the house. And by using powerful binoculars were able to identify Jennifer — from photographs biked to them en route from a source in the Globe office — through the big picture window on the landing. So far so good, at least they knew where she was. Swiftly they located the position of the distribution point governing the phone lines into the house. In built-up areas like Richmond Hill, these are concealed either beneath concrete pillars on the inner side of the pavements or behind green-painted iron cabinets set into walls. The distribution point for Jennifer’s house was beneath a concrete pillar which, with the right key, simply unlocks and is easily removed, revealing up to 1,000 pairs of wire, connecting subscribers to the exchange. To sort out which wires lead where, a copy of British Telecom’s records for the area is essential.
These men had such access, just as they had access to a British Telecom van, although they were not employed by BT at all.
By the time Jennifer made her second phone call to Todd Mallet, and spoke to Angela, the two bogus telephone engineers had successfully fitted a tap, with a radio transmitter allowing them to monitor Jennifer’s line from a distance.
They listened in to that call and reasoned, taking into account the time by which Jennifer had arrived in Richmond and her apparent desperation to reach the Devon policeman, that it was an acceptable risk to assume that Jennifer Stone had yet to take her evidence to the police. It seemed there was still time to act.
An hour or so later, the BT van pulled away. Anna, driving her Golf GTI without a great deal of skill as usual and noticing frighteningly little, had not even been aware of the departing van as she swung into Jennifer’s driveway. Jennifer herself hadn’t looked out of the window since arriving home, but to have remained in the street outside could have aroused suspicion, if only from a nosy neighbour. Because of its radio transmitter, the tap could be monitored from any place at all where the receiver was able to pick up an adequate signal. There was no sign of a surveillance operation in Jennifer Stone’s tree-lined street that night, yet her home was being watched every second, and when the downstairs and then the upstairs lights in the big imposing house were eventually switched off, at about midnight, figures started moving silently in the street again. Two dark-clad men slipped through the gate and disappeared into the shadows of the garden.
The explosion happened at just after five in the morning. Its roar could be heard right across the river in Chiswick and Brentford and in the other direction as far away as Kingston. It was a huge and devastating thing. The house which took the main force of the blast was almost completely flattened. Daylight would reveal that barely more than a few isolated bricks remained intact. Such was the power of the blast that, although detached and separated by trees and high walls, the two houses on either side were both almost completely demolished too. One was empty — its inhabitants thankfully away on holiday. The elderly couple in the second house were killed. Neighbours in other badly damaged houses, particularly the one directly opposite, also suffered appalling injuries. A pregnant woman was not expected to last the day in intensive care. A child was blinded, and one man lost both his legs.
Jennifer Stone, Anna McDonald, and her daughter Pandora were in the house at the heart of the explosion.
All three of them died at once. They were blown to pieces.
Twenty Two
Dominic was on his way into breakfast when the police called at his seminar hotel to break the news to him. They only knew Anna and Pandora were in the Richmond house because Anna had called a neighbour to ask her to feed her cat, and had said where she was and who she was visiting. The neighbour, an early riser and a worrier, had heard of the Richmond explosion on a radio newsflash soon after it happened and immediately called the police. Two officers from the Yorkshire force took Dominic, who never listened to the radio in the mornings, into the hotel’s conservatory overlooking the Yorkshire Moors and told him as gently as possible what had happened.
There was no gentle way to tell Dominic McDonald that his wife and only daughter were both dead.
Dominic did not seem able to register it. Eventually the police left. Shocked colleagues, also informed by the police, tried to comfort him. Dominic told them he would rather be alone and that he wanted to go home. He seemed calm and composed in spite of his distress. He went to his room to pack and then he disappeared.
They found him late that night shivering on a moorland rock escarpment. It was raining and he was soaked to the skin and shivering violently. He was wearing only light trousers and a shirt. His feet were bleeding and bruised because he had forgotten to put shoes on. When he saw the rescue party clambering towards him he was not sure if he felt relief or disappointment. He was well aware of how easy it could be to die of exposure in open moorland at night, even in late May. But he was not at all sure he wanted to live without Anna and Pandora.
They took him home to Barnes and as he stepped through the door of the comfortable, reassuring town house he burst into tears. The sobs racked his whole body. He did not stop crying for two days.
Todd Mallett was phoned at home while he was drinking his morning tea. The shock was terrible. He had vaguely heard on the radio of an explosion in the London area, but he didn’t even know where Jennifer Stone lived. No warning bells had sounded. Why should they? Mrs Stone was listed as Jennifer’s next of kin. She had to be told, and when the news came through to Durraton police station the desk sergeant, an alert and ambitious man, remembered seeing an entry in the log left by the duty officer the previous evening. Jennifer Stone had been trying to contact Detective Inspector Mallett.
Todd said very little, except that he would go to see Mrs Stone himself, and he wanted a policewoman to go with him.
After he put the receiver down he was overcome at first with a great sense of sorrow and loss, and then, when his brain cleared a little, his head was filled with crazy thoughts and suspicions. No. It was all too far-fetched. There couldn’t be that kind of connection. And he couldn’t work it out yet, but there were many questions to be asked. Frightening questions.
His wife came into the kitchen, fresh from the bathroom shower, and he told her about Jennifer. She turned white.
‘Oh my God, Todd,’ she said.
And then she confessed how Jennifer had called the previous night and she had somehow failed to pass the message on to him.
‘She sounded a bit desperate, I suppose... but I didn’t know...’ Angela Mallett’s voice tailed away.
Todd could think of nothing to say to her. Not for the first time since their marriage, he only narrowly stopped himself lashing out with his fists. Certainly he couldn’t be bothered to hide his own personal grieving.