Chapter 1

2019

Fourteen years later

Shortly before lunch on a bright, late spring day, Sir Francis Morahan, Lord Justice of Appeal, and now chair of the Inquiry into the security services’ record against terror attacks, hand-wrote a letter to Sara Shah, junior counsel at 14 Knightly Court Chambers, EC4. Despite the piercing sun, he took a grey woollen hat and matching gloves out of the bottom right drawer of his desk. Rather than his familiar grey coat, he then chose from the hooks behind his office door a waterproof yellow anorak, normally reserved for bad weather, and a broad white and red striped scarf. Carrying these under an arm, he turned right out of his office, avoiding the open-plan area housing the Inquiry’s staff, and descended by the back stairs to the underground car park. He unchained his bicycle, put on the anorak, wrapped the scarf around his nose and mouth, pulled the hat down over his forehead and extracted sunglasses from a trouser pocket.

He pedalled out of the exit, which faced the new American Embassy in Vauxhall, then two hundred yards along Nine Elms Lane before joining the Thames Path. Feeling pinpricks of sweat on skin tightly covered by his chosen clothing, he cycled past the MI6 building, through the tunnel beneath Lambeth roundabout and carried his bike up the steps to Westminster Bridge, avoiding the crowds milling around the London Eye. Across the bridge he turned onto the Embankment and, after a few hundred yards, north into Carmelite Street, just east of the Inns of Court.

The heat now stifling, and anxiety flooding his body, he turned into Knightly Court, locked the bike on the black railings, rang the bell of number fourteen, climbed the stairs and, with a mumble of ‘Letter for Miss Shah’ in his best south London accent, dropped his envelope in front of a receptionist. She hardly looked up.

Morahan scurried back down the stairs and reclaimed his bicycle; only when he had reached the south side of the river did he remove the scarf, hat and jacket. He had paused, though not by design, opposite the Houses of Parliament. For the first time in years, decades even – perhaps right back to that moment when his brief spell as an MP and then Cabinet Minister had begun with the General Election victory of 1997 – Francis Morahan buzzed with excitement and anticipation.

She was the link; the one person able to make the connection he needed. And yet, if he told her that, she would surely run away. He had shaken the dice and dared to roll them. But, for the game to start, Sara Shah must agree to play.

Later that afternoon, the addressee of Morahan’s envelope walked back from court to her Chambers with a senior QC.

‘He’s as bent as a coiled python,’ said Ludo Temple.

‘Hardly as deadly,’ said Sara Shah.