‘Idiots. All of them. I assure you.’

‘We no longer have the death penalty in this country, as I’m sure you are aware.’

‘I am dying anyway. It will be on my terms.’

‘The first thing they do is put you on suicide watch. It’s not uncommon. See what happened to your beloved Mr Shipman.’ Pace almost laughs but holds it in.

‘He was a doctor,’ Artaud corrects. ‘And he ended up killing himself. We forget about that when we talk of how many people’s lives he ended. It was one more than he is given credit for.’

‘You want to die, Mr Artaud?’ Pace is doing it on purpose now.

Though he skimmed through the manifesto, Detective Sergeant Pace picked out the pertinent information. He understands Artaud’s ideology, no matter how warped and deluded it is.

‘There are a lot more things I had hoped to achieve. So, no, of course I don’t want to die.’

Detective Sergeant Pace waits a moment to respond.

Detective Sergeant Pace leaves the sentiment hanging in the air.

Detective Sergeant Pace looks in the rearview mirror until he catches Artaud’s eye.

‘Then I guess you have to.’

135

The news breaks quickly and videos of the incident are surfacing. No network has the audacity to show people falling to their death, instead they choose to repeatedly broadcast some footage from a bystander’s phone of the Teacher appearing on the walkway where eighteen people are already standing. She turns her back, raises her arms to the side, then falls backwards, and the person taking the footage drops her phone.

You can hear the screams and the sound of a body battering against the floor.

Then eighteen more as the lens points at the sky.

There’s a spike in activity on the People of Choice social media page. Geraldine from Houston, Texas, writes, ‘Why are all the big events happening in the UK? All we had here was that school shooting.’ There are 423 comments calling her out as an insensitive, inbred moron.

Paulson eventually arrives on the scene. He uses the word clusterfuck three times in the first ten minutes. He asks, ‘How the hell can we keep up with this?’

The bridge is shut.

No boats are allowed to pass beneath it.

The river police are busy looking for three of the victims that ended up in the river. Just one survivor could blow the case wide open.

There are none, of course.

There is but one certainty.

Helicopters circle overhead. The sixteen bodies on the bridge are already bagged. Paulson identified one of them as Levant. It feels like a lead. He was related to the Man in the Light and now he has joined his nephew. He calls it in to get permission to force his way into the old man’s home.

There’s no need. The door is still open. Ready for Paulson to get it all wrong.

Ergo is hungry.

All the people that were shot and killed in that mosque have been forgotten about.