A beer would be nice, and a decent bed. Maybe he’d give Antonia de Vere a bell, see if she was in town and fancied dinner. He knew he shouldn’t but…

A thought struck him.

‘Justin,’ he said, looking at the MI6 man. ‘If Zeff didn’t tell the Chechens where Charlotte Morgan was going to be on holiday, who did?’

Chapter 117.

117.

ALMOST AS JOHN CARR said that, officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, accompanied by several MI5 operatives, were removing the last computers and paper files from the Luton town centre offices of the law firm Spicer, McGraw and Hill.

The partners and senior staff had all been arrested, and were currently dispersed around various police stations in the south-east of England.

The senior partner, Paul Spicer, had been detained in the early hours at his eighteenth century former rectory home in a village near Luton, and was currently refusing to answer questions in an interview room at Paddington Green.

Spicer was unhappy and bewildered – unhappy, because he hadn’t had his usual hearty breakfast, just a stale Met Police cheese roll and a cup of weak tea, and bewildered because he had no idea what was going on.

They kept talking about his relationship with Emily Souster – poor, beautiful Emily, the true believer, campaigner for Palestine, well-bred champion of the poor and downtrodden, and scourge of American imperialists – who had been murdered on that beach in Morocco not three weeks before.

And for the life of him he couldn’t understand why.

In time, the police would come to realise that his bewilderment was genuine – though their investigations would uncover serious legal aid frauds and offences of incitement to commit perjury which would finish Spicer’s legal career and see him receive a long jail sentence a year from now.

What they were trying to establish was not so much the relationship between Spicer and Emily Souster as the relationship between Emily Souster and one Argun Shishani, a Chechen jihadist who was suspected of involvement in the Marbella and Málaga outrages, and the kidnapping of Charlotte Morgan, Martha Percival, and Emily Souster herself.

And of complicity in Souster’s murder.

Souster’s grieving parents had gone to clear out her flat, and had discovered certain items, including an iPad in a locked box at the back of her underwear drawer.

Her father had broken open the box and cracked the code on the iPad – she always used some combination of family birth years.

On it he found hundreds of WhatsApp messages between his daughter and a man calling himself ‘Hamid’.

Hamid was a man with dark eyes and a cruel mouth, and it soon became clear that he and Emily had begun a relationship. His messages had started out innocently enough, but had soon descended into the gutter, so much so that Mr Souster felt terrible for prying.

Still, he read on.