The Sleep of Reason

THE
SLEEP
OF
REASON

David Derbyshire and Mark Rowley

Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ

[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents © David Derbyshire and Mark Rowley 2022

The right of the above authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Print ISBN 978-1-80031-0-124

Ebook ISBN 978-1-80031-0-131

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All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

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Sir Mark Rowley’s highly successful 31-year career in policing included posts as Chief Constable of Surrey; Assistant Commissioner at the Metropolitan Police; and lastly head of UK Counter Terrorism Policing. Globally recognised for his leadership expertise in national security and policing, after retiring in 2018 Sir Mark was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his ‘exceptional contribution to national security at a time of unprecedented threat and personally providing reassuring national leadership through the attacks of 2017’.

David Derbyshire is an award-winning national newspaper journalist and has written features for The Sunday Times, The Times, the Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and the Observer. He was the 2004 Medical Journalist of the Year, and was joint winner of the 2008 Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards campaign of the year.

Visit David at
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To Helena and Alison

‘The sleep of reason produces monsters.’

Francisco Goya

DAY 1

Wednesday Morning

Chilton Park, Kent

The queue had paused, so Zahra took the opportunity to close her eyes and listen. It was a game she had played as a young girl, and one she turned to regularly during the moments of tedium that occupied so much of her sixteen-year-old life. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her donkey jacket and focused. The clanking of the ride machinery, as if an iron bar was being dragged along kerbstones, dominated her soundscape, but not enough to drown out the barbs of the gobby group of girls behind her taking turns to damn each of their absent friends. She listened harder and caught the burble of a blackbird staking out its territory from the clump of young silver birches and evergreen shrubs planted alongside the queue.

They’d queued under the scruffy winter skies for more than an hour now, far longer than her brother Jawad had predicted, lurching forward, spreading out and then bunching up again like an immense concertina. Around them were miserable attempts to decorate the ride in fibreglass and concrete. An upturned telephone kiosk, now pink rather than poppy red, lay alongside a bored sabre-toothed tiger while, nearby, a blonde Viking stood proudly with one boot on the neck of a tentacled alien. For a theme park ride, the theme was a complete mystery, thought Zahra.