Seventy-Two Virgins

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Barlow, and they resumed their walk to the wrought-iron porch of the Members’ Entrance.

‘You’re quite happy for me to check your teeth?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Ah,’ said Roger, brightening again. ‘Now that is what we call Barlow’s Law of the Displaced Negative. In principle you are saying that you are happy for me to look at your teeth, but there is a stray negative, the no, which simply needs to be removed from the beginning of that sentence and inserted between subject and predicate, to give the real meaning. You secretly mean, “It’s not fine.” To give another example, men are often asked, “Do I look OK in this dress?” and they answer, “No, no, you look great.” The displaced negative is a clue to their real thoughts. They should say, “Yes, darling, you look great.” The female equivalent is “No, no, darling, you have got masses of hair.”‘

Cameron snorted, not altogether fondly. She was damned if she was going to ask Roger if she looked OK, mainly because she had no (real) doubts about the matter.

Finally she left Roger, berthing his bike in the cycle racks at the bottom of New Palace Yard. She felt she had done her best.

He knew about the fluoride speech. He was on top of the Betts case, and the plan to save the respite centre. He was, by his standards, under control.

Now she had to go quickly to find Adam.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 0908 HRS

Even though it was a warm July morning, the man outside the Red Lion pub in Derby Gate was wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket and faded cords. He had scuffed brown brogues from which emerged cheap towelling socks, one of which was blue, and one of which looked suspiciously like a trophy from the goody bag of Virgin Atlantic. When the authorities would come that evening to examine the contents of his wallet, they would confirm that he was Dr Adam Swallow, thirty-five, and that he had recently been travelling in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, to judge by the few decayed and crumpled low-denomination bills he had saved from his trips. He was a reader at the Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Oxford, and a plastic badge suggested that he was director of Middle Eastern studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. The innermost fold of his wallet contained a forgotten condom of great antiquity and no contraceptive value whatever.

He was tall and lean and dark, and sitting forward on the beer-splashed bench, and between his thick wrists he held a tabloid paper. He was chuckling.

The centre page feature was a tremendous tub-thumping why oh why piece by Sir Trevor Hutchinson, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph. Entitled ‘Our Shameful Surrender to Terror’, it dilated on the various erosions of liberty entailed by the current obsession with security. Was it not outrageous, whinnied Sir Trev, that the Queen was being served with plastic cutlery, aboard the royal flight, all these years after 9/11? He gave a vigorous description of the Metropolitan Police Maginot Line around the Palace of Westminster. He railed against the frogmen in the Thames, the boom that had been constructed in the river, to protect the Commons Terrace from a riparian boarding party, the glass barrier in the Chamber, that shielded the electors from their representatives, or vice versa, for the first time in our island story. And then he related his almost insane irritation, when boarding a flight from Heathrow to Inverness to fulfil an important shooting engagement, at being asked to produce his passport. There being 300 words to supply after this opening lungful, Sir Trev went on to deplore the general phobia of risk in today’s namby-pamby society, alighting on such diverse themes as the near cancellation, on insurance grounds, of the climactic firework display at the Henley Regatta, and the use of cup-holders and — splutterissimo — air-bags in the new American tanks which the army, in defiance of his advice, was on the verge of buying.

‘Good stuff, good stuff,’ chuckled Adam, who had written his own share of bilge in his time. He folded the paper carefully, and would have dropped it in the bin, had not the bins all been removed for security reasons from this part of Westminster. He checked his watch, stood up, and looked boldly out into the street, his bright brown eyes shining with tension. They should be here any minute, he thought.

Where was Cameron?

Now the drops were chasing each other down Jones’s pitted temples, and he could hear the chatter of the Black Hawk, coming up the Embankment with the President underneath.

He wondered if there was a sign on the roof, a visible identification code, and then began to feel the ambulance shrieking their crime to the heavens.

As he waited for the last lights to turn, he rubbed his palms together, and made little black worms of dried blood.

‘He says four of them killed the warden,’ said the station commander into the phone.

‘Killed a traffic warden? We all feel like that sometimes.’

‘No, I think he’s serious. ‘Can he identify the ambulance?’

‘Sounds like he had to scarper pretty quick.’

‘We’d better get on to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner’s office.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said the station commander. ‘I’ll do that right away. I don’t suppose you know the number, do you?’

‘I’ll get back to you in a minute. You’ve sent someone round to Tufton Street, have you?’

‘Good thinking,’ said the station commander. ‘Does he have any idea where this ambulance has gone?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 0909 HRS

‘Continue for 200 yards,’ said the satnav in the ambulance, still yearning in its silicon soul for Wolverhampton and home, ‘and then try to make a U-turn.’

‘Oh shut up, in the name of Allah,’ said Haroun. ‘Can’t you work out how to make that thing stop?’ said Jones.

‘It is a sharmoota. It is a whore,’ said Haroun. ‘It’s just a machine.’

‘It is an American computer whore.’

Habib had been silent, playing with his prayer beads, a chunky collection of sickly lime-green onyx. He had smooth, rubbery, almost Disney-ish features, and crinkly hair which he concealed in all weathers beneath a woven black skullcap. Now he opened his sad brown eyes.

‘The man from the truck will tell them about us.’

‘What will he say? There are too many ambulances.’

‘He may have seen our number.’

‘Believe me,’ said Haroun, still fantasizing about what he might have done with that thoracic spike, ‘the heathen dog was too frightened. It’s not him I’m worried about, it’s him.’ He jerked his head towards the back of the van.

Jones took a still bloodied hand off the wheel as they came round into Whitehall. He pointed to a packet of surgical wipes on the dashboard, next to a Unison coffee mug.

‘Please pass me one,’ he said to Haroun in Arabic, and then read out the English motto on the side of the box: “‘Clean hands save lives”. Indeed.’

‘He could ruin it for everyone,’ said Haroun in Arabic, passing the wipes like an airline stewardess.

‘I know.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Have faith,’ said the man called Jones, sponging the blood off his hands, and dropping the tissues on to the