‘Something to be grateful for.’ Black looked round as Carol cleared her throat. ‘Can I help you?’ he said, his voice irritable.
‘DCI Jordan, Major Incident Team.’
‘You’ve come to the right place,’ the fireman said. ‘It doesn’t get much more major than this.’
‘It’s my job to work the crime scene,’ Carol said.
‘I thought CTC were on their way,’ Black said, frowning. ‘Surely that’s up to them?’
‘Until they get here, it’s mine,’ she said briskly. This wasn’t the time to get into a protocol wrangle. ‘Do we know what we’re looking at here?’
The fire chief pointed to a small room on the plan. This is where we think it came from. My lads tell me it looks like there are human remains in there. So, the presumption is suicide bomber. We also think it was probably TATP, like the London tube bombings. It has a particularly distinctive signature.’
‘That’s all speculation, obviously. Until forensics and the bomb guys have been in there,’ Black added.
‘Where are forensics?’
‘Waiting for the all-clear to go in.’
‘Is the Bomb Squad here?’ Carol asked.
‘On their way. We’ve got a couple of explosives dogs going through the stands now,’ Black said.
‘OK. Get one of the dogs to clear the bomb locus, please.’ She smiled up at the fireman. ‘I’m going to need some protective gear for me and my team. And we’ll need someone to show us the way. Can you help us out?’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not exactly safe,’ he said.
‘All the more reason for us to get what we can while we can,’ she said. The gear?’
He looked her up and down. ‘It’s going to be a bit big on you, but you’re welcome to what we’ve got. Where’s the rest of your team?’
‘Give me a minute.’ Carol stepped to one side, aware that Black was pissed off with her assumption of control over the crime scene. She got her phone out and called Kevin. ‘Bring me up to speed,’ she said.
‘I’m five minutes away. I’ve got Paula and Sam with me. Chris is on her way separately, Stacey’s back at the office. She’s already calling in as much CCTV footage of the stadium approaches as she can get.’
She told him where to meet her, asked him to brief Chris, then called the forensics team. ‘Be ready to roll in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘We’re going in.’
The closer they approached to the site of the explosion, the warmer it became. Carol could feel the sweat plastering her hair to her head under the bulk of the oversized fire helmet she was wearing. The fire officer picked his way along the debris-strewn corridor. Behind Carol came a skeleton forensics crew, followed by her own team.
He stopped abruptly a dozen feet from the edge of a jagged crater in the floor. ‘There you go,’ he said. That’s what used to be the electrical junction room for the corporate hospitality boxes and the media centre.’
Not much remained. The walls had been pulverized, the cables shredded and the pipework that had been buried in concrete had been transformed into shrapnel. The force of the bomb had punched outwards and upwards. The walls above had peeled back like the segments of an orange and she could see daylight through the gap. As Carol stared at the destruction, she realized that the red shreds and patches scattered at random over the remains of the room were human flesh and blood. Not much turned her stomach these days, but this was a sight that made her gag. She swallowed hard. ‘Can we get round to the other side?’ she asked.
The fireman nodded. ‘From the other end.’
‘OK.’ She turned to the forensics team. ‘I want half of you to start from the other side. We want as much trace evidence as we can get, but I don’t want anybody taking risks. We’ll do as much as we can, then we’ll get the experts to build us some sort of platform so we can access the rest. It looks as if we’ve got the remains of a suicide bomber here, but let’s get as much material as possible so we can be sure whether there was one or more of them.’
The white-suited technicians set about their business. Cameras flashed, tweezers gripped, bags were filled and labelled. Carol moved back to her team. ‘I want you to backtrack through the stand. We don’t know how he got in, but there must be security cameras. Paula, Sam-figure out where the access points are and start checking the footage. Kevin, stay here with the SOCOs, take a look at the scene and see what you can come up with. Chris, with me.’
She headed back the way they’d come, Chris at her side. ‘Punters don’t get into service corridors,’ she said. ‘Somebody brought him in. We need to find the security staff and whoever was on duty in the corporate hospitality reception. He didn’t just walk in off the street with a rucksack bomb. Let’s see what we can dig up before CTC turn up.’
It took them twenty minutes to track down the people they were looking for. The crisis evacuation plan provided a safe haven for stadium staff in the assembly hall of Grayson Street Primary. But nobody had keys for the school. At first, it had looked as if the staff were going to melt into the afternoon, but an enterprising turnstile manager had insisted they stay together and shepherded them quarter of a mile down the road to the Chinese restaurant where he liked to eat lunch. The owner had welcomed them with open arms and an avalanche of free dim sum. The only problem was that nobody knew where they were. Finally, Carol had managed to get a number for one of the hospitality receptionists and tracked them down.
It took another twenty minutes to get the bare bones of what had happened. Carol left Chris taking more detailed statements and she headed back to the stadium, making a couple of quick calls on the way. Even in the short time she had been away, things had moved on. The streets around the stadium were much clearer, and were being kept that way by the mounted division. A couple of low loaders were moving cars from the immediate vicinity of the stadium to make way for emergency vehicles. And in the middle of the Vestey Stand car park was the biggest caravan Carol had ever seen. The white trailer looked like a converted cargo container, with two rows of opaque windows along the side. Apart from a strip of black-and-white checks, like a police cap band, there was no identification. A single door in the end of the trailer was flanked by two black-clad officers in riot gear and helmets, semi-automatic pistols held across their bodies. It looked as if the cavalry had arrived. Carol headed for it.
