I was aware of nothing for a moment but the staccato of the taxi’s diesel engine. I realized I was holding the clutch down. I lifted my foot a fraction and, with a loud protest from somewhere up front, we began to move. I let the clutch right out and accelerated hard. We lurched forward. I was amazed. The bumper must have absorbed almost all the impact. There was a grating sound, but it wasn’t loud. I looked around. People were clambering from their cars and running over towards the Fiat. The lorry had stopped and the driver was walking, puzzled and dazed around the side.

I decided the best place for me to be right now was anywhere but here. The police would get their report in due course and we would get ours, but there wasn’t a great deal of love lost between the police and MI5, particularly when it came to corpses in wholesale quantities as it was always them that had to do the clearing up, and I didn’t want to be stuck for the rest of the day with a bunch of sarcastic traffic boys from Ealing.

I accelerated off to the left, ignoring several shouts. Five hundred yards down the road a woman with suitcases hailed me. I ignored her and she waved furiously as I drove past. I wanted to make my report to Fifeshire and make it fast. I wanted to know what else anybody knew about Operation Angel, and if nobody knew anything about it, how we were going to find out more, and find out fast.

After a couple of miles, I started looking out for a phone booth. I wanted to make a call to the forensic boys to make sure they went through that car, and what bits of its occupants they could separate from it, with something considerably finer than a toothcomb. After about a quarter of a mile a booth came up on the left.

The vandals hadn’t messed about with this one: all they’d left were the Yellow Pages and a length of wire. It’s funny, but I’d had a feeling that morning when I woke up that somehow it wasn’t going to be my day.

Chapter 3

3

‘The basic principle of a nuclear power station is no different from any other form of electricity generating station. It is very important to remember this. Everyone gets blinded by science when they hear about nuclear power stations, but we are not all about fission cycles and fast neutrons and complicated formulas. All we do is to generate steam which is then forced past turbines that rotate and cause electricity to be generated – just as the wheel of a bicycle rubs against the dynamo, turning the knob at the top of the dynamo, which then generates the electricity that lights the lamps.