As she approached, both guards shifted, pointing their weapons towards her.
One of them turned away and muttered into his radio. The other didn’t let his hard, flat stare lighten for an instant. Carol stood her ground, reminding herself that this wasn’t about her, it was about the injured, the dying and the dead.
The one with the radio turned back and stepped closer, checking the photo on her ID against her face. ‘A few more grey hairs and a few more wrinkles,’ she said. His tough guy expression didn’t even twitch. He reached behind him for the door handle, pushed it open and indicated with his gun that she should enter. Biting her lip and refusing to give in to the temptation to shake her head in wonder, Carol did as she was instructed.
She walked into a low-ceilinged entrance hall. A narrow flight of metal stairs led upwards. Two doors faced her, and two more black-clad cops, one at the foot of the stairs, the other between the doors. The one by the stairs stood to one side and said, ‘Up top, ma’am.’
Feeling as if she was in a low-budget spy movie, Carol climbed the stairs, a hollow clang at every step. Another vestibule, another guard, who nodded her through another door. She walked into a spartan conference room containing a metal-topped trestle table and eight folding chairs. John Brandon sat in one; three others were occupied by men in black leather jackets over black T-shirts. Two had a pale shadow of stubble on their skulls. The third had a short fuzz of dark hair. At first glance, the only way to tell them apart was the extent to which male- pattern baldness had carved out its territory.
The one in the middle said, ‘Thanks for joining us, DCI Jordan. Have a seat.’
‘Hello, sir,’ Carol said to Brandon as she sat down next to him. She turned to the one facing her. ‘And you are?’
He smiled. It did nothing to dispel his carefully cultivated air of menace. ‘We don’t do names and ranks. Security. You can call me…David.’
‘Security? I’m a DCI. I’ve worked for NCIS. Who do you think I’m going to tell?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing personal, Carol. I know your record and I’ve got nothing but respect for you. But we operate along very strict guidelines that are there for our protection. And given the work we do, us being protected means that everybody else is better protected.’
He might work out of Manchester, but his accent said London and the Met. He had that swagger she’d learned to detest when she’d worked there. She’d bet there weren’t many women working in CTC. It wasn’t a female- friendly environment. All that macho posturing, covering up for the fact that they didn’t really have any autonomy. They might like to pretend they ran the game, but the truth was they didn’t take a toilet break without the say-so of the dedicated antiterrorist team of the Crown Prosecution Service. The men in black might deliver the menace, but they were only the message-boys for their masters in Ludgate Hill. And it was clear Brandon had no stomach to stand up to the message-boys or their masters.
‘Fine. No names, no pack drill. And if you don’t mind, we’ll skip the pep talk about how we’re all on the same side and we’re all going to work together to nail the bastards who did this. I know the rules. My team and I are at your disposal.’
He breathed heavily through his nose. ‘Glad to hear it, Carol. I’m sure your local knowledge is going to be very helpful to us. Of course, we’ve got intelligence which you haven’t about the hothead fundamentalists on your patch. We’ll be shaking the trees and seeing who falls out. We’ll…’
‘Round up the usual suspects?’ she said sweetly. ‘Actually, we might have saved you a bit of time on that already. There’s a van parked down in the Grayson Street staff and players’ car park. A1 Electricals. Just before three, a young Asian man drove in. He had what looked like authentic paperwork to carry out an emergency electrical repair in the Vestey Stand. One of the security staff took him up to the junction box room and let him in. Less than ten minutes later, the bomb went off. I think it’s reasonable to assume our van driver was also our suicide bomber.’ She took out her notebook. ‘According to the PNC, the van is registered to an Imran Begg, 37 Wilberforce Street, Bradfield.’ She closed the notebook. ‘It’s about five doors down from the Kenton Mosque. You might want to tread carefully when you go knocking.’
‘Thank you, Carol. We’ll take it from here. If there’s anything we need your people for, we’ll let you know. Meantime, I know you’ve got a high-profile murder case to be getting on with, so we won’t keep you from that. We’ve also got our own dedicated forensic team, so we’ll be releasing your people back to you once we’ve collected their evidence.’
Carol tried not to show how she was seething inside. ‘Where will you be based?’ she asked. She knew their practice was to take over a police station and evict its usual inhabitants.
‘We were just talking about that,’ David said. ‘Normally we’d take any suspects back to our dedicated suite in Manchester.’
‘However, I suggested David and his team could use Scargill Street for interviews and custody,’ Brandon said.
‘Good idea,’ Carol said. Scargill Street had been taken out of mothballs for the Queer Killer investigation seven years before and had been kept on the back burner ever since, a perpetual Cinderella waiting for the refurb. Letting the CTC loose there would keep them out of the way without creating a pool of homeless officers trying to find perches on everybody else’s already overcrowded territory.
‘And that’s fine as far as it goes, given the scale of this investigation. In Manchester, we’re tooled up for specific, targeted raids, not the kind of sweep we’re going to end up doing here. But Scargill Street isn’t wired up for the latest kit. So we’re also going to use your Major Inquiry suite at HQ,’ David said.
This time, Carol couldn’t hide her dismay. ‘So where’s my team supposed to work from?’ she demanded.
‘David’s people can use the HOLMES2 office,’ Brandon said. ‘You’re not using that for Robbie Bishop’s murder.’
He was right. The Home Office Large Major Enquiry System had been set up as a means of filtering and classifying the volume of information generated either by a series of crimes or a single wide-ranging event. Each force had its own dedicated team of HOLMES2 officers. They were highly trained, skilled officers and Carol didn’t hesitate to use them when it was appropriate. But wherever possible she relied on Stacey and her prodigious talents to manage the MIT investigations.
