Thames snaking through the city like a long, parched reptilian tongue.
Fucking bullshit.
The car ahead stalled and Doyle muttered under his breath, glancing again at the pedestrians nearest him.
In a city of nine million people you think you're just going to spot them?
He waited for the car ahead to start moving again.
Julie Neville and her daughter and, oh, wait a minute, there's Robert Neville too. What a stroke of quite amazing fucking luck.
Doyle shook his head.
The words needle and haystack sprang to mind.
Drive around London, spot the three people you need to find just like that.
Piece of piss.
The car in front moved off, Doyle drove on, cranking up the volume on his cassette.
'… Living in the fast lane is easy, 'til you run out of road…'
He tapped a finger on the wheel in time to the thumping beat of the music.
'… Friends will turn to strangers when you're out of control…'
As he brought the car to a halt at traffic lights, the counter terrorist scanned those who walked before him.
Will the Neville family please step forward?
Again he looked at his watch. It was becoming a habit. One which he seemed to have acquired the longer the day went on. And with good reason.
In just over thirty minutes, if Neville didn't speak to his daughter, he would detonate another bomb.
God alone knew where, and God had fuck all to do with it.
Bomb.
Doyle suppressed a smile.
Just like old times, eh?
Belfast. Londonderry.
London.
What was the difference?
People had died, more would die.
Trying to find an armed and dangerous man. It had a ring of familiarity to it, didn't it?
Welcome familiarity?
The lights changed to green and Doyle turned left, guiding the car along the Victoria Embankment, the river and the pedestrians to his left-hand side now.
He sucked one last lungful of smoke from the cigarette and jammed it into the already badly overflowing ashtray.
Immediately he lit another.
'… It's a hard life to love…' thundered the cassette.
Doyle shook his head.
They weren't going to do it.
It was as simple as that.
Barring a miracle, there would be another explosion at five.
A miracle.
Julie and Lisa Neville were probably out of the city by now.
Long gone.
Doyle slowed down for the next set of lights.
Come on, think. Where would Neville go? You're supposed to know how he works. After all, he's not that different to you, is he?
Finding Neville was one thing. Finding his wife and kid was another.
Doyle looked at his watch again.
'Shit,' he murmured under his breath.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
He'd known when he climbed into the Datsun that he'd been clutching at straws. That cruising the streets of the capital in search of a missing woman and her child smacked of desperation, but what the hell else was there to do? Besides, he needed to be alone for a while. He'd been around others too long already today.
He needed the solitude which had been so much a part of his life for so long. He needed no company.
Not even Georgie?
Her image flashed fleetingly through his mind and he blinked hard to drive it away.
It persisted stubbornly for a few seconds longer than he would have liked, then was gone.
He sucked hard on the cigarette.
The traffic moved on.
So did time.
4.32 P.M.
The East London Cemetery stretched for roughly half a mile towards all compass points, one of many resting places that seemed like green oases within the desert of concrete, brick and glass that comprised the capital.
Separated from the memorial recreation ground alongside it by a high privet hedge, the cemetery was the usual clutter of headstones, some old, some new, of well-kept and uncared-for graves. Of resting places for those admirably old and some pitifully young.
At its centre was the crematorium. The hub of an unmoving wheel.
A network of paths, some gravel, some Tarmac, wound through the cemetery like arteries. Elsewhere, walkways had been fashioned across grass by the passage of so many feet.
So many mourners.
There was a number of wooden benches too, most of them placed close to the taps which also dotted the necropolis.
Kenneth Baxter walked slowly past one of these taps, glancing at it as it dripped water on to the gravel below.
A slight breeze was blowing now and it brought with it the scent of flowers.
He glanced at the graves flanking the path as he walked, hands dug into the pockets of his jeans. Many had flowers on them, some still wrapped in Cellophane, which crackled whenever the breeze blew too strongly.
He saw some rose petals skitter across the path ahead of him, propelled by a gust of wind.
A middle-aged woman was filling a plastic watering can from one of the taps.
Baxter watched her as she lugged the heavy article back towards a nearby grave and filled the metal vase on the plinth. Then she carefully began arranging carnations in the vase.
The tap continued to drip.
One droplet for each tear shed in this place?
Baxter continued walking, his pace slow and even. But his pace didn't match the expression on his face.
As he walked he looked constantly back and forth, eyes scanning the cemetery.
Searching.
Had he looked behind him he wouldn't have found anything too unusual about the young man in the jeans and T-shirt who had just entered the graveyard.
PC Rob Wells saw Baxter ahead of him but, instead of following, he turned off on one of the gravel paths at his right-hand side and made his way slowly along it, his trainers crunching on the bed of loose stone.
