Not Fox. He wasn’t going to end up like some sort of zombie, subservient to the establishment as he counted down the days until he finally pegged out, unloved and unmourned, a pantomime hate figure for the masses.
Yet the charges he faced were enough to keep him inside for ten lifetimes. He was the sole surviving terrorist of a bloody siege at a London hotel that had left more than seventy people dead, and there were a whole host of witnesses who’d seen him kill at least five of them in separate incidents in what was widely acknowledged to be Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity. There was absolutely no doubt that he would be found guilty at his trial. Even his defence team had conceded as much, but, since the taxpayer was paying them by the hour, they were still prepared to give it a go. And there was no doubt either that the sentence he’d be handed would be a whole-life tariff. In other words, there was no hope of him ever getting out.
And yet …
Fox’s head hurt. Three days earlier he’d had his first taste of prison violence when he’d been attacked by another prisoner armed with a homemade shank. He rubbed a finger along the wound where the blade had torn across his scalp, touching each of the nineteen stitches. It felt tender to the touch but he ignored the pain. It would heal soon enough, as would the deep cuts on his right hand and his left and right forearms, which he’d lifted to ward off his attacker’s blows. He’d been bloodied, as he had been on more than one occasion in his life, but, as always, he remained unbowed.
The TV in the corner of his cell was switched to BBC Breakfast News, as it was every morning. He liked to find out what was happening in the outside world while he ate his breakfast, even though it was rarely anything exciting. But today something was actually happening. The well-scrubbed male presenter had interrupted the fawning interview he was doing with some fourth-rate actor to say that the BBC were getting reports of a bomb attack on a cafe in central London.
He got up from the bunk and pressed the call button on the wall. Prison was, he thought, much like staying in a very cheap and tatty hotel, which was probably why so many of the prisoners quite liked it.
Outside he could hear the early morning noises of the prison: the clanking of doors; the shouts; the rattle of keys; the occasional burst of laughter — the sounds of a closed, insular community, but a community nonetheless, and he almost wished he could be out there as well. But for the moment he was being held in protective custody on the governor’s orders in case there was a further attempt on his life, and it didn’t look like that was a situation that was going to be changing any time soon.
A few minutes later, the flap on the cell door opened and the face of Officer Fenwick, a bearded screw at the wrong end of his fifties who’d have trouble stopping a clock let alone a riot, appeared in the gap. It almost amused Fox that Fenwick, unarmed and way too old, was one of the few men standing between him and freedom.
‘Good morning, Mr Garrett,’ said Fenwick with a cheery smile as if he was addressing his next-door neighbour rather than a man who was about to stand trial for his part in arguably the worst mass murder in modern British history. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Good morning, sir,’ said Fox, pressing his face up to the gap, pleased to see the other man flinch slightly at his closeness. ‘You know it’s less than a month to my trial?’
‘I do.’
‘And you know what I’ve been charged with?’
‘I do.’
‘And you know I haven’t said a word to the investigating officers about any of the people involved alongside me?’
‘Are you going somewhere with this, Mr Garrett, because I’m actually very busy?’
Fox nodded. ‘Absolutely.’ He stared coolly at the other man. ‘I want to cooperate, Mr Fenwick. I want to tell the police everything I know about the people behind the Stanhope siege. And I want to do it right now.’
‘You know the procedure, Mr Garrett. You’ll need to make a formal request.’
‘It’s urgent.’
‘So are a lot of things.’
‘I’ve just seen on the TV that there’s been another bomb attack in London. And I know it’s the same people behind it.’
That stopped Fenwick. He frowned. ‘How could you possibly know?’
Fox stared him out. ‘I just do,’ he said firmly. ‘And I need to speak to the governor. Now.’
Fenwick nodded slowly, clearly deciding that Fox’s announcement was too big to be ignored. ‘I’ll inform him of your request.’
‘And something else.’ Fox paused to make sure even Fenwick couldn’t get this next part wrong. ‘There’s only one person I want to talk to.’
Seven
08.50
Tina stood on the pavement, next to a graffiti-strewn wall, smoking a cigarette, her hands still shaking with the shock of what she’d seen.
The road had been sealed off for fifty yards either side of the lorry, and the place was crawling with emergency services vehicles. The man Tina had been chasing had now been removed in an ambulance, after increasingly desperate efforts by the paramedics to save him had come to nothing. Now there was only a large, irregular bloodstain on the tarmac where he’d been.
The driver of the lorry looked shell-shocked. Two traffic officers had put him inside one of the squad cars furthest away from the scene to breathalyse him and take a statement, where he wouldn’t have to look at the evidence of what he’d done. It would be Tina’s turn to give a statement soon, but so far all available manpower had been sent to the scene of the explosion near Victoria Station. Thick, bilious smoke still rose above the nearby buildings and helicopters circled lazily overhead like vultures waiting for the kill. The sound of sirens was everywhere.
She sighed. Barely a month back in the force and already it had all gone horribly wrong. It wasn’t that she hadn’t done her job — she had. The suspect had been running away from the scene of an explosion that had almost certainly been caused by a bomb. She’d identified herself clearly and yelled at him to stop. If he’d been innocent, he would have done. But he’d run for his life, hadn’t looked where he was going, and it had ended badly. If it had been anyone else doing the chasing, Tina would have been hailed a hero. But because it was her, she wouldn’t be. In the opinion of far too many of her police colleagues, Tina was a magnet for tragedy.
DC Clive Owen wandered over. He had a sympathetic look on his face. ‘Are you all right?’
She took a long drag on the cigarette. ‘I’ve been better.’
‘Look, you did the right thing. The word is this guy planted a bomb in a cafe in the middle of rush hour, and there are big casualties. What happened, serves him right. Saves the taxpayer the cost of keeping him behind bars for the next forty years.’
Tina thought about the look on the terrified suspect’s face when he’d seen she was chasing him. He hadn’t looked like a hardened terrorist.
‘I’ll stand up for you if there’s any shit,’ continued Owen. He looked over her shoulder. ‘And I think it might be coming now.’
A gleaming Audi A6 had pulled up on the other side of the police tape. A second later the door opened and Tina’s boss, DCI Frank Thomas, stepped out. He spotted them immediately, and marched over. He was a big man with a florid expression and a strong desire to make DCS, and he looked extremely pissed off. He hadn’t wanted Tina on his squad in the first place, and doubtless his view had just been reinforced.
‘This is a major bollocks-up,’ he said in his strong Welsh accent, sounding just like a cut-price version of Tom Jones, as he stopped in front of her and Owen. ‘We’ve got a bomb attack with multiple casualties, and the only suspect’ — he made the word ‘only’ stretch twice as long as it should have — ‘is run over and squashed by a lorry before we get a chance to question him. And to top it all, the copper doing the chasing, who left her colleague behind in the car-’