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About the Author

WILL CAINE lives in South London. He is a BAFTA award-winning and highly-acclaimed investigative film-maker and journalist.

He has spent much of his life delving into the secrets of state. The Inquiry is Will Caine’s first thriller.

Dedication

In memory of

my brother-in-law James

and his son Miles.

Epigraph

‘There were one or two big ones. That’s how we kept a lid on it for so long. But we were never fully sure about them. How could we be? They were from a different world.’

Ex-MI5 Officer, private conversation

2005

The ping of a phone. She jerks awake, grabs it, brings it close to her face, checks the time.

6.47 a.m.

Odd. No one messages her this early.

She lies back on her pillow, pulls up the duvet, clicks on ‘view’.

Don’t use the buses or tubes in London today.

She rubs sleep from her eyes. What the f— is this?

She scrolls down. Just a number. No name, no one in her contacts. She rechecks the number – nothing familiar about it.

She screws her eyes shut, kneads them with her knuckles, thinks. She hits reply, thumbs on keys.

Who is this?

She waits. After a few seconds, the phone pings again.

Message sending failed.

What is this? She clicks back on the message, hits ‘options’, adds the name as ‘Anon’ and the number to her contacts. She hits call. The ringtone is instantly interrupted by a woman’s voice. ‘The number you have dialled is unobtainable.’

Weird. Totally random. Has to be a mistake.

She gets up, washes, dresses, applies make-up, the everyday rhythms. The words still churn in her head. Butterflies jig in her stomach. She begins to realise she can’t get rid of the nagging thought.

What if the text is for real? And the sender’s chosen to vanish…

Stop imagining. It’s a rogue message – people get them all the time from all sorts of weirdos. She wonders how many others must have had it. Thousands probably – some madman trying to create a scare. That’s probably easy – a simple piece of code can do mass send-outs of texts.

Or just a sick joke from a sick mind.

She goes downstairs, makes her usual cup of coffee, toasts her usual slice of bread. She turns on the radio, volume low. All the chatter’s about London’s great victory the day before, winning the 2012 Olympics to be held in seven years’ time. She feels better.

The nag’s still there.