Ultimatum

Seven

08.50

Tina stood on the pavement, next to a graffiti-strewn wall, smoking a cigarette, her hands still shaking with the shock of what she’d seen.

The road had been sealed off for fifty yards either side of the lorry, and the place was crawling with emergency services vehicles. The man Tina had been chasing had now been removed in an ambulance, after increasingly desperate efforts by the paramedics to save him had come to nothing. Now there was only a large, irregular bloodstain on the tarmac where he’d been.

The driver of the lorry looked shell-shocked. Two traffic officers had put him inside one of the squad cars furthest away from the scene to breathalyse him and take a statement, where he wouldn’t have to look at the evidence of what he’d done. It would be Tina’s turn to give a statement soon, but so far all available manpower had been sent to the scene of the explosion near Victoria Station. Thick, bilious smoke still rose above the nearby buildings and helicopters circled lazily overhead like vultures waiting for the kill. The sound of sirens was everywhere.

She sighed. Barely a month back in the force and already it had all gone horribly wrong. It wasn’t that she hadn’t done her job — she had. The suspect had been running away from the scene of an explosion that had almost certainly been caused by a bomb. She’d identified herself clearly and yelled at him to stop. If he’d been innocent, he would have done. But he’d run for his life, hadn’t looked where he was going, and it had ended badly. If it had been anyone else doing the chasing, Tina would have been hailed a hero. But because it was her, she wouldn’t be. In the opinion of far too many of her police colleagues, Tina was a magnet for tragedy.

DC Clive Owen wandered over. He had a sympathetic look on his face. ‘Are you all right?’

She took a long drag on the cigarette. ‘I’ve been better.’

‘Look, you did the right thing. The word is this guy planted a bomb in a cafe in the middle of rush hour, and there are big casualties. What happened, serves him right. Saves the taxpayer the cost of keeping him behind bars for the next forty years.’

Tina thought about the look on the terrified suspect’s face when he’d seen she was chasing him. He hadn’t looked like a hardened terrorist.

‘I’ll stand up for you if there’s any shit,’ continued Owen. He looked over her shoulder. ‘And I think it might be coming now.’

A gleaming Audi A6 had pulled up on the other side of the police tape. A second later the door opened and Tina’s boss, DCI Frank Thomas, stepped out. He spotted them immediately, and marched over. He was a big man with a florid expression and a strong desire to make DCS, and he looked extremely pissed off. He hadn’t wanted Tina on his squad in the first place, and doubtless his view had just been reinforced.

‘This is a major bollocks-up,’ he said in his strong Welsh accent, sounding just like a cut-price version of Tom Jones, as he stopped in front of her and Owen. ‘We’ve got a bomb attack with multiple casualties, and the only suspect’ — he made the word ‘only’ stretch twice as long as it should have — ‘is run over and squashed by a lorry before we get a chance to question him. And to top it all, the copper doing the chasing, who left her colleague behind in the car-’

‘It wasn’t quite like that, sir,’ said Owen.

‘Shut up, Clive. The copper doing the chasing is none other than the Black Widow herself, probably the most controversial figure in the Met, Miss Tina Boyd.’ He glared at her. ‘Not only have we now got a mountain of paperwork, and a high-profile IPCC investigation to contend with, but the one man who could point us in the direction of the rest of his terrorist cell is dead.’

‘What would you have preferred, sir?’ said Tina, holding her ground. ‘That I let him get away?’

‘She’s right, sir-’

‘Clive, I told you to shut up.’ DCI Thomas turned back to Tina. ‘What I would have preferred is that you had maintained a visual on him but kept well back, as I believe you were told to do, and as is standard procedure in this kind of scenario, because that way …’ He paused. ‘That way we would have got him alive.’

‘I did what I thought was right,’ Tina insisted.

‘You did what you thought would cover you in glory. There’s a big difference.’

‘Sir, I was trying to catch a criminal. That’s what I thought we were meant to do. It was just bad luck that he got hit.’

‘Bad luck seems to follow you around.’

Tina sighed. She couldn’t argue with that. She’d also worked out that it was better to be conciliatory than confrontational. ‘But I was twenty yards behind him, sir, well back, when he ran straight into that lorry’s path.’

‘Do we know he’s part of a terrorist cell, sir?’ asked Owen.

Thomas gave a single decisive nod. ‘Yes. There’s been a call claiming responsibility from some Islamic outfit that no one’s ever heard of. They say there’s going to be another attack today. A bigger one. It might be bluster, but the whole Met’s on full alert. Which is why we needed him in one piece so badly.’

‘I’d like to make amends, sir,’ said Tina.

‘Well, unfortunately you’re not going to get a chance to.’

‘You’re not suspending me, are you?’ Tina felt the disappointment like a blow. Despite her frustrations with the way the Met was run she loved her job, and knew she was good at it.

‘I’ll be honest, DC Boyd, a part of me’s sorely tempted, but apparently you’re needed elsewhere. I’ve been told I have to temporarily release you from CID with immediate effect. I’ve also been given a number for you to call.’ He fished a business card from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘You’ll still need to make a full statement on what happened here later today, and you’ll have to make yourself available to the IPCC when they come calling. But as of now, you’re free to go.’

Tina stared at the handwritten mobile number on the card. At first she thought it was some sort of joke, but it really wasn’t a day for jokes. She exchanged puzzled glances with Owen — clearly he didn’t have a clue what was happening either — then turned back to Thomas. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, having to shout above the noise of a rapidly approaching helicopter.

She waited for it to pass before dialling the number. It was picked up on the first ring, and straight away she recognized the voice on the other end.

Mike Bolt. A man she’d shared far too much history with, but whom she hadn’t seen or heard from in well over a year.

‘I hear from your boss that you’ve been involved with the suspect from the coffee shop bomb,’ said Bolt, with none of the usual preliminaries as to how she was.

‘That’s right. Is that what you’re dealing with too?’

‘Indirectly,’ he said cryptically. ‘I need you for something.’

Tina took a last drag on the cigarette and crushed it underfoot. ‘What?’

‘You remember Fox, the captured terrorist from the Stanhope siege? Well, he wants to cooperate, and for whatever reason — and I cannot think for the life of me what it could be — he wants to talk to you. I need you over here right away.’

‘But I haven’t got transport, and the roads around Victoria Station are gridlocked. I also haven’t got a clue where you are, or even who you work for these days. It’s been a long time, remember?’ She resisted asking why he hadn’t bothered to call before now. She already knew the answer to that one.

‘We’re a ten-minute walk from where you are now. I’ll text you the address.’

He ended the call, and Tina took a deep breath. It was barely nine a.m. and already this was turning into one of the most dramatic days of her career.