She let the manager go and watched with detached amusement as he scuttled away, ear clamped to his mobile as he took orders from head office.

‘Patronising tosser,’ said Gabriel to Campbell. ‘Let’s go and talk to the SOCO boys.’

‘Think you mean men, ma’am,’ said Campbell, but under his breath and out of earshot.

#

New Scotland Yard, Victoria Embankment, London

Assistant Commissioner Steven Tennant ended the call to the National Security Adviser and swivelled his chair to face the Thames. He had read recently that the river was as clean as it had been since the Industrial Revolution and that otters and fish and porpoises were now splashing through the water like a scene from a Disney cartoon. But from the tenth floor, it looked the same dirty brown torrent, washing the secrets and filth away from London and out to the North Sea. He recalled a grim summer night, early on in his career, when he fished the body of a drunk out of the festering water, and even today the thought of the corruption and sewerage below the river surface left him uneasy.

He rubbed at his stubble with the back of his hand. Chris always told him off for doing that at home, insisting it made him look indecisive. He prodded the flesh under his jaw, conscious that it was too prolific, as were the bags around his grey eyes. He stared at the reflection in the window. His hair was thinning, in contrast to his waist which seemed to thicken every year, and his body moved too easily in the places where it shouldn’t and refused to move in the places it should. He was flabby and grey, he thought, like one of the plump pigeons perched on the ledge in front of him.

Tennant rose from the chair to stretch his legs and get a better view. The Met had moved to this refurbished office block on the Victoria Embankment in 2016 and installed the Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters on the tenth floor. From here, eighty senior and support staff co-ordinated the work of thousands of counter terrorism officers in eleven regional units around the country. The biggest single part of this network was the London Counter Terrorism Command, also known as SO15 and based at the shiny, new Counter Terrorism Operation Centre twenty minutes’ drive away in St Pancras. Working here at the Yard away from the action at CTOC was frustrating for Tennant at times, but the proximity to Whitehall, and having the rest of the Met’s senior leadership team in the same building, outweighed the disadvantages.

New Scotland Yard was the Met’s fourth HQ and, as Tennant’s boss, the Met Commissioner, had pointed out more than once, technically should have been named New, New, New Scotland Yard. The interior had been decorated in corporate white and could have belonged to a bank. One of the few concessions to its new occupiers – aside from the rotating New Scotland Yard sign by the front doors – was in the toilets, where architects had displayed a rare sense of humour and decorated each cubicle with a historical police car livery.