THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. (26 page)

‘Jake, what’s wrong with you? Are you as drunk
as I am
? Snap out of it, it’s your round. Go get the drinks.’ Zarshad held up his empty glass.

‘OK.’ Jake downed the rest of his lager and stood up. He walked toward the bar, deep in thought. The same petite barmaid was still there, offering service with a smile. Jake didn’t bother trying to conceal his interest in her breasts this time. He looked straight down at them. There was a crucifix on a chain around her neck; it nestled in her cleavage.

Jake ordered two pints and then walked back to where Zarshad was sat.

‘The crucifix. A cross. The cross as the symbol of Christ,’ Jake said as he plonked the beers down onto the table and stared out of the window again.

There was a sign on the wall opposite the pub. It read ‘King’s Road’.

‘King’s Cross – they separated at King’s Cross. They went north, south, east and west. In the shape of a cross from fucking King’s Cross! It’s all symbolic!’ Jake stood up suddenly and walked toward the door.

‘For fuck’s sake, Jake, where are you going? Stop being weird. You sound like my father. He’d tell ya there are no Christians left in England; all atheists – no one goes to church any more. That’s why he’d say it doesn’t count if this country is attacked. We’re all fair game. He’d say it’s not against his holy book to attack atheists…’

Jake wasn’t listening. Zarshad’s voice faded as he walked out of the door, his mind a mess. Fuzzy with drink, pennies, arcade machines and Wasim laughing at him. He stumbled into the street and waved at Zarshad as he walked past the window. He needed to be alone. He had thinking to do. The beer was no good for thinking. It was no good for anything except forgetting.

72

Saturday

20 August 2005

1003 hours

The flat above the sari shop, Whitechapel, East End of London

Jake awoke with a start. The room was light. The flimsy floral curtains did nothing to keep the sun out. His grandmother had been a poor sleeper her whole life, awake most of the time it seemed. He could turn up at any time of the day or night and she’d welcome him in. He wondered if she’d ever slept. Curtains that kept out the sun were not high on her agenda.

He wondered what had woken him. Then he heard it – there was a loud banging at his front door.

‘Shit – what now?’ he said to himself as he jumped out of bed.

He scoured the bedside table for his phone. It was nowhere to be seen. Where was it? What time was it? Had something happened? Another bomb?

The banging was getting louder. He walked down the hallway, opened the front door and was startled to see the twenty-year-old daughter of the sari-shop owner standing there looking at him. Jake was wearing just his boxer shorts and an embarrassed smile. She looked his semi-naked body up and down and smirked.

She was short, five feet two, with long dark hair and amazing eyes. Jake had seen her a few times but didn’t know her name. She was wearing an orange sari draped partially over an exposed midriff.

‘Err, hi. Wasn’t expecting to see you,’ he said awkwardly.

‘Clearly.’ She smiled broadly and her eyes sparkled.

‘How can I help?’ he asked, standing there self-consciously in his boxers and wanting to bring the conversation to an end quickly.

‘It’s your cat. She’s been crying at your window for the past two hours. She knows you’re in because she can hear you snoring. We can all hear you bloody snoring. It’s like a foghorn downstairs in the shop. Maybe you should let her in and feed her?’

‘Yep. Sorry.’

The young girl turned and walked down the stairs. She stopped on the half-landing below and paused, looking back up at Jake with a big smile.

‘We all miss your grandmother. She was sweet, if a little old-fashioned. It’s great to see you taking on the flat and not selling it. We know you’re away a lot. We look after Edwina when you’re not here, you know.’

Jake was comforted by her comments. ‘Thank you. I miss my grandmother too. Very much. I really appreciate you looking after Ted. My job is a nightmare right now.’

The girl nodded and smiled at him as she continued her walk down the stairs and back to the shop.

Jake went to the kitchen. Ted was indeed yowling at the window to come in. He slid the sash window up and she jumped off the corrugated iron roof and onto the lino at his feet. She seemed really pleased to see him, rubbing herself all around his bare legs and purring loudly.

‘Aww hello, Ted. Long time no see, babes. You look well. I can’t say I’m surprised – I’d look well if the girl from downstairs was taking care of me regularly too.’

Jake stroked her soft black fur. She felt clean and silky. He reached into the cupboard and pulled out a tin of pilchard cat food, the only edible item in the entire kitchen.

He watched her scoff down the entire bowl. She was happy and well rested for once.

‘Right, Ted, I should see the kids. It’s been almost two months since we had a proper full day out together. Fucking job. It’s all right for you – you’ve got the girl from the sari shop downstairs on your side. They’ve only got their mum. As amazing as she is, I think their dad needs to try and see them a bit more often too.’

Ted looked up from her food as he spoke, her green eyes locked on his as if she understood him. The sunlight made her coat gleam.

Jake’s grandmother was not used to living alongside people of a different skin colour. Some might even have described her as a bit on the discriminatory side. Jake thought her whole generation were in many ways. By today’s politically correct standards, she could have been termed a racist. Jake remembered her talking about the sari-shop owners downstairs. ‘My neighbours are Indian, you know, but they are really very nice.’

Jake smirked at the backhanded compliment. She had been right in a way. About the daughter, at the very least – she really was very nice.

He walked to the bedroom to find his phone.

73

Saturday

20 August 2005

1523 hours

East Dulwich, Southwark, south London

The girls were playing on the slide at the local park, a short walk from their home, though they hadn’t walked. They had pulled on their roller skates to race down there like their lives depended upon it, the excitement unbearable. There had been a frenzy of activity to find their skates in the cupboard under the stairs, a frantic lacing up of their boots and then a bundle of bodies, arms and legs to get out of the front door, and see who could be first onto the driveway outside.

Tayte was the oldest at seven. She had Jake’s eyes and similar colouring. The rest of her was her mother – tall, elegant, long hair, and both confident and sharp with her tongue. Megan was five. She was tiny in comparison. Nothing came easy to her but, like Jake, she was a fighter and determined to win at everything she did. She was more of a tomboy, liked her hair short and was comfiest in jeans and trainers. ‘I don’t want girls’ clothes,’ seemed to be her favourite saying. She was much more like Jake in her temperament too. She had her own way of doing things.

Jake sat at a battered, wooden picnic table next to some red, fixed play equipment. Bees buzzed among the dandelion clocks as the tallest conifer trees cast shadows. The shadows pointed at the playground in the middle of the park, like dark arrows on the lush grass showing where the fun was to be had. Days like this were what Jake remembered his life had been like before. Before the bombings. Before he’d joined the Branch. Before his mother and grandmother had died. Before the split – and before he’d started drinking too much.

The girls had been really pleased to see their dad when he’d arrived at the house, the place that had been his own home too until he’d walked out. Stephanie had actually smiled at him when he’d arrived to pick them up. He had keys to the house but no longer used them. Jake wondered if the guilt he felt would ever leave.

Stephanie and Jake spoke very little – just like it was when they were married really. Friends, good friends, partners, but no longer lovers. They had been, once upon a time, before the kids. They’d had a good sex life but it had disappeared once the first baby had turned into two. Jake didn’t really know why. He’d become consumed by his job, as Stephanie had with her own career and the children’s increasingly busy lives. They’d just grown apart, as the cliché ran.

When the girls were around, or the family kept dropping in, there never seemed to be any time to talk. There was no chance to have grown-up nights out, nor a window to enjoy intimacy any longer. All he’d wanted was to be close to someone. He didn’t really understand why he’d not tried harder to work it through with her.

Maybe it was a failing within him, an inability to stick at it. He wondered if it was just his own psychological issues rather than a problem between them both. That’s why he had walked out, he reasoned. He’d needed to work through in his own head what was going on.

After his mother and grandmother had died, he’d pushed all the emotions to the back of his mind and filed them in the ‘I’ll-deal-with-those-later’ box.

He’d immersed himself in his work. He wasn’t hiding from the box of emotions, or so he kept telling himself – there just wasn’t time right now… He’d deal with it later.

The box was left abandoned, still unopened.

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy – watch this!’ Megan shouted as she slid face-first down the slide, launching herself off the end, like Superman freeze-framed in the air for a nanosecond, before landing with her chest on the tarmac at the bottom. She laughed and got up.

‘You, you, you! Your go now!’ She pointed to Tayte at the top of the slide.

Tayte looked down at her nice new blouse and favourite checked skirt, and shook her head.

‘Chicken!’ Megan stomped off and headed back toward the stairs for the slide.

The girls were growing up fast.

What had that space given him? Space to miss them growing up? Not to be a proper dad? Space to drink more? More time to work? His head was no clearer. He missed the girls. He missed Stephanie in many ways. Yes at first he’d had lots of sex – mainly with strangers whom he never saw again. Yes the sex was sometimes good, dirty sex. But the cost? He’d traded all this for some cheap thrills and now a girlfriend he never saw? Was that it? Is that what he’d done? Maybe if he opened the box and dealt with the grief of losing his mother and grandmother, maybe that was the key to it all? There was no time now. It would have to wait.

‘Come on, girls. Skates on. Time to go home!’ said Jake, standing up from the table.

74

Monday

22 August 2005

0900 hours

Commercial Road, East End of London

Jake and Lenny were heading east with the windows down on the car. The majority of the early-morning traffic was trundling into the city in the opposite direction. Clear blue skies and no wind; today was going to be a scorcher. The pavements were busy with people dressed for the occasion.

‘You didn’t get drunk over the weekend then, Jake? I’m assuming that’s why you wanted to drive today, unlike most days…’ Lenny smirked across at him in the driver’s seat of the BMW.

‘I spent all weekend going through the phone data. I didn’t sleep much. That data is an absolute gold mine. I did have a few jars on Friday night though.’

‘After the post-mortem? You managed to keep it down without being sick, I’m amazed! So you hooked up with your bit of skirt on Friday, did you?’ asked Lenny.

‘Nah, bumped into someone in the pub, an old mate. We got chatting about religion. He knows his way around the Quran. Interesting bloke.’

‘A devout Muslim in the pub, Jake? Pull over, you’re fucking drunk and high on drugs, mate!’

Jake laughed.

‘He’s non-practising. Father was very strict, force-fed him Islam as a kid – so much so that he can recite it verse by verse. Likes a beer now though. More my type of bloke. He’s all right.’

‘Who is this guy? I’ve never heard you talk about him before.’

‘Just an old pal. I’ve known him for years. Alex, his name is.’

You never called a snout by their real name to anyone. Only the handler and controller knew their true name and address and the snout would be assigned a pseudonym. Jake preferred unisex names that did not immediately reveal the informant’s gender to outsiders.

He took informant handling seriously. He had to protect identities. It was a dangerous role for all parties, including Jake. You didn’t blab about your informants to anyone, not even your best mates.

Being a police snout could be a lucrative business, as long as you got results. For information that led to a conviction, a police snout might get a lump sum of £2,000.

The Security Service operated an entirely different system. They used suitcases full of money to cultivate an informant, before the snout had even provided any information. These people were then paid a monthly retainer – sometimes as much as £2,000 per month, just to sit on the books.

Mobile phones and cars were also provided to sweeten the deal and ensure that the snouts were able to do whatever the Security Services wanted them to do.

Having been used to the results-driven system within the police, Jake found the methods used by the Security Services very odd. He felt that these snouts were just being paid on a monthly basis to remain in terrorism without delivering the goods. They lived off the money like a salary, became bored, and spent more time getting involved in illicit or extremist activity. Jake saw it breed within communities. Friends and relatives also wanted money for doing virtually nothing – or worse, actually used the money to become involved in dodgy activities when previously they wouldn’t have bothered or have had the time or means to do so.

Jake much preferred the results-based system that the police used. The snout only got paid if they behaved responsibly and provided a measurable outcome to the police.