‘Umm, well, no. It’s pretty frustrating really. The bombers must have been careful about keeping up a Chinese wall. Maybe it’ll be easier now they’re tired, but what we really need is this Met source who’s in the Beast. Who is that? Is that one of ours?’

Nigel rolled his eyes in disgust at this situation. ‘Daniel, I don’t have to tell you what constraints operational security can place even on inner-departmental information sharing.’

‘Oh,’ said Dan. ‘So we’re on to them.’

‘We haven’t got them.’

‘Of course.’

‘In fact, to be totally frank, I think it’s fair to say that not very much was done about it before last night.’

‘Right,’ said Dan grimly. They’d often spoken about other teams’ failure to be proactive.

‘We need to get these people found today. Pull bodies off anything you need to; everything else can wait. I’m going to call the commissioner now for more manpower.’

‘Great, that’s what I was thinking, too. Because it’s been all over the news that the Beast are leaving their offices. Our guys might use their bomb somewhere else.’

‘If there’s a bomb.’

Dan was surprised into momentary silence, then said, ‘What do you mean, if there’s a bomb?’

‘We don’t just accept things on the Daily Beast’s say-so, do we? What evidence have we actually got? A news report, some rumours going round the department.’

Dan let this thought ramify, and asked slowly, ‘So what are you saying?’

‘The department’s been lucky so far. No one’s been hurt. Nothing embarrassing has happened. But we need those people found and we need them questioned.’

16

As Jeremy steered his car along the deeply grooved route to Copper House, he suspected nothing of the turn Willis’s investigation was taking. Overnight, his sense of the Burqa Bombing story had settled into an unfamiliar optimism. It had been with no small pride that he told the girls at breakfast he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to drive them to school because he had to go away for a week on a big story. He’d seen that they were impressed and, with a feeling that it was magnanimous of him to be concerned with family arrangements on a day like today, he was suddenly moved by the thought that he was their father.