The nag’s still there.
Should she show the text to her father? She goes back upstairs, creeps along the landing, peers in. Curtains drawn, no lights. He’s still asleep, she shouldn’t disturb him. Shouldn’t worry him. In her bedroom, she straightens the duvet, puffs her pillow, goes to the mirror to brush her hair. She looks out of the window. The line of terrace roofs is the same as always. A dog barks. She jumps, her heart thumps. She shakes her head violently to shift the nag.
Down in the hallway, she grabs her coat and stands stock still. The text is just… she comes back to the same word. Weird. What weirdo would send something like that?
Is there anyone she knows?
Just… just forget it. It’s a prank, some fool’s attempt to frighten.
Think. It must be nearly ten years since the last bomb went off in London, IRA, of course. Except for the nail bomber in Soho. Then there was 9/11 and the Madrid train last year. But whatever may happen in the rest of the world, this city, this country, is at peace. She’s not going to take any notice of it.
Perhaps it’s someone trying to organise a boycott, some kind of strike. Yes, her rational mind tells her, could well be that. Odd way to do it though.
She takes a deep breath, straightens her shoulders and, closing the front door behind her, strides out towards Tooting Bec underground station for the daily journey northwards to the Chambers where she’s just starting the law career that will be her life.
On the tube, it’s the same as always. Young couples chatting, eyes buried in books, ears plugged into Walkmans, mouths gaping with exhausted yawns. The carriage is filling to squeezing point. Drawing into Waterloo, she sees through the tube window a mass of faces waiting to crush her – a nightmarish canvas of every colour, scowling and grinning back at her.
The train jerks to a halt. Something hits her. She turns, sees a large rucksack on the back of a bearded young Asian. She catches his eye – he avoids hers. She goes on watching. His appearance – the neat haircut, trimmed beard – seems just like the photos of the 9/11 hijackers. She tries to remember if the Madrid train bombers used rucksacks to carry death. She has an overwhelming sense they did. Heat sears her face. She needs to get out.
The train stops, doors open. She pushes, the oncoming swarm miraculously divides to let her through. She pauses as the doors close and watches the carriages leave with their crammed human cargo. She walks, fighting for breath – the train grinds on towards King’s Cross.
It was just a young man with a rucksack, for God’s sake.
She crosses Hungerford Bridge and turns right along the river, the lightest of rain refreshing her. She looks around. Far to the west, beyond the pale grey hovering over the Thames, the sky is brighter. The day will clear. It will be the same as any other.
A bus on the opposite side of the Embankment, its passengers’ faces like polka dots, heads towards the city.
‘… buses or tubes…’
The buses and tubes are running normally. There’s no sign of any strike action – or boycott. No demonstrators or posters.
The nag becomes a throb.
At Chambers she is greeted with smiles. It seems that, even if everyone else here is white and English, they like her and want her for the youth and difference she’ll bring.
The clerk inspects her. ‘Are you OK?’ She detects his concern.
‘Yeah, fine,’ she smiles. What’s he noticed? ‘Just murder on the tube.’
What made her say that?
She wants to ask if anyone else got the same weird text that she did. But if none of them did, she can imagine them staring at her – who’s the weirdo here?
She sits at her desk, fires up her computer and begins to study her case files. She can’t concentrate, fingers sweating, slipping and sliding over keys. She feels the other three in her office watching her and looks up. Their heads are glued to screens. Instead, the face of that guy with the rucksack flashes before her.
It’s no good. It won’t go away. She looks at her watch – 9.21 am. Still most of the day to come. Surely loads of others must have got the text – the authorities probably know about it already. Even so, she should warn them, however nonsensical it might seem. But how? She’s a young Muslim woman – might that not raise questions? Cast suspicion on her? Might they want to interview her father? Even her new colleagues in Chambers?
Best if there was some kind of anonymous helpline. She’ll check for that on her computer. Head-down, concentrating on her search, she hears a distant sound. Sirens.
She hits a number for the Met’s confidential line and dials it.
She hears more sirens. She looks up – her office colleagues are hurrying towards a window. She’s seized by dread, stops dialling, puts the phone back. Is something happening?
She clicks on the BBC website. The 7th of July 2005. Nothing. The news is still all about the Olympics. The sirens are just an accident, a fire, usual thing, a day like any other, she repeats to herself.
She dials again. A recorded message tells her to hold on, someone will be with her very soon. ‘Please don’t hang up.’
Suddenly the BBC website flashes up ‘breaking news’.
First reports of a massive disturbance on London’s underground system
Slowly and silently, she puts down the phone and stares blankly ahead. A terror dawns.
Oh God. No. Surely not. Surely it couldn’t have been him.
Could it?
2019
Fourteen years later
Shortly before lunch on a bright, late spring day, Sir Francis Morahan, Lord Justice of Appeal, and now chair of the Inquiry into the security services’ record against terror attacks, hand-wrote a letter to Sara Shah, junior counsel at 14 Knightly Court Chambers, EC4. Despite the piercing sun, he took a grey woollen hat and matching gloves out of the bottom right drawer of his desk. Rather than his familiar grey coat, he then chose from the hooks behind his office door a waterproof yellow anorak, normally reserved for bad weather, and a broad white and red striped scarf. Carrying these under an arm, he turned right out of his office, avoiding the open-plan area housing the Inquiry’s staff, and descended by the back stairs to the underground car park. He unchained his bicycle, put on the anorak, wrapped the scarf around his nose and mouth, pulled the hat down over his forehead and extracted sunglasses from a trouser pocket.
He pedalled out of the exit, which faced the new American Embassy in Vauxhall, then two hundred yards along Nine Elms Lane before joining the Thames Path. Feeling pinpricks of sweat on skin tightly covered by his chosen clothing, he cycled past the MI6 building, through the tunnel beneath Lambeth roundabout and carried his bike up the steps to Westminster Bridge, avoiding the crowds milling around the London Eye. Across the bridge he turned onto the Embankment and, after a few hundred yards, north into Carmelite Street, just east of the Inns of Court.
The heat now stifling, and anxiety flooding his body, he turned into Knightly Court, locked the bike on the black railings, rang the bell of number fourteen, climbed the stairs and, with a mumble of ‘Letter for Miss Shah’ in his best south London accent, dropped his envelope in front of a receptionist. She hardly looked up.
Morahan scurried back down the stairs and reclaimed his bicycle; only when he had reached the south side of the river did he remove the scarf, hat and jacket. He had paused, though not by design, opposite the Houses of Parliament. For the first time in years, decades even – perhaps right back to that moment when his brief spell as an MP and then Cabinet Minister had begun with the General Election victory of 1997 –