There was no doubt. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader in July 2005 of what became known as 7/7. The man who, in blowing himself up on the Circle line, had taken six other lives with him; who had led three other suicide bombers to their deaths along with a further forty-six innocent victims.

Two weeks before, unknown to her until now, she had sat at his table and been recorded in the act.

Chapter 15

15

Sara Shah was a rational being. Since settling into her legal career, she slept well at night. She wasn’t prone to detecting conspiracies; she didn’t allow suspicion or paranoia to affect her judgement. Yet, from the moment she woke after a second fretful night, she couldn’t prevent her brain and eyes wanting to assess threats from every angle.

Her first act was to put on loose-fitting pocketed trousers and a shirt and jacket. She needed to get the contents of Sayyid’s second and third deliveries out of the house. The office might be under some scrutiny but it was safer than home. Her choice of dress gave her options.

Her second act was to inspect the street. No sign of the car or its occupants.

Her third act was to vary her journey to work, hailing a cab from the high street rather than summoning one to her house.

With Morahan dead, only one other person, Sayyid, knew that her presence at a restaurant table, next to the man on her right in the surveillance photograph, was the link to a deep morass of illegal activity of which Sami’s story was only the tip. Although the audiotape indicated that she and that person had some familiarity with each other, she could not know whether Sayyid – or Morahan – had any detailed knowledge of its extent.

Sayyid was responsible for drawing her into this, but he, or she, was an opaque mystery. Pressing the code to enter the Inquiry’s offices – with a smart of irritation that no one had yet thought to change it – and then climbing the stairs and inserting her second-floor pass – which should also have been reconfigured – she entered the open-plan area feeling a wave of irritation towards Sayyid. He was the visiting sprite who’d fired the starting gun and then retreated into some far undergrowth, invisible from the field of play but, from safe cover, watching the game unfold. Why?

The office was silent. Rayah’s and Clovis’s eyes were fixed to their screens, refusing to be distracted by her appearance, Pamela Bailly’s office door ajar with no sign of life beyond. It still felt as lifeless as the mortuary in which Morahan’s stiff body must now be lying. The Inquiry had been an organic living being; now it was decapitated. She murmured a faint ‘Good morning’ and quickened her stride towards the corridor and the Legal office.