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Bexleyheath, South East London

It was going to be a long night. The car was snarled up on the A2 in Eltham and the journey back to her office in CTOC at St Pancras, which had taken less than fifty minutes that morning, would take at least ninety. Gabriel could not justify asking Campbell to use the blue lights, so she was stuck. When she was a child, London used to have two rush hours a day – morning and evening. Now rush hour started at 8am and ended around 10pm.

Campbell was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, a habit which irritated Gabriel. She left a message with Ray to warn him she would be late home and then checked in with DI Bose at St Pancras.

‘Just heard from the digital team, ma’am,’ said Bose. ‘They’ve tracked Fletcher on CCTV to Crayford about thirty-five minutes after he left the park. But then he’s disappeared. He’s either ditched the bike or taken a route to avoid cameras.’

‘What about friends and social media? Anyone in that neck of London?’ she said.

‘Very little close family – a dozen or so known associates,’ said Bose. ‘House visits have started on those and will continue first thing tomorrow. Nothing from his financial records yet, but we’ll get an alert the second he uses a card.’

‘Thanks, Eva. Any more on Abu Mujahid?’

There was a slight, awkward pause. Gabriel had asked Bose to do the weekly check with the intelligence agencies on the whereabouts of the jihadist before she had left that morning. ‘Sorry, ma’am, we’ve been focused on Fletcher. I’m afraid Abu Mujahid’s on the back-burner today.’

Gabriel sensed Bose’s discomfort, which in turn irked her.

‘I’m aware of that, DI Bose, but we can’t afford to let him slip away just because of what’s happened today. Put in the calls, please.’

She was bloody good was Eva, thought Gabriel as she leant back in her seat and stared at the crawling car headlights around her, and she shouldn’t have snapped. But Bose knew how important Abu Mujahid was to her.

She had another hour in the car and had already planned the briefing that would take place on her return, so made a conscious decision to rerun the day in her head. She retraced her movements and thoughts from her arrival at Chilton Park. But when she reached the briefing in the canteen, and the moment she was shaken by the penetrating, dark eyes of the teenage girl Zahra, the girl who reminded her so much of Isobel Harris, her train of thought was derailed. She banished the day’s events and delved deeper into memories which were now uncertain and confused. This was a place she usually avoided going. She hated the weakness, the vulnerability, the guilt, but this evening these memories were too easy to slip into.

Her thoughts shifted back two years, to the moment she was sat in the ops room, tuna sandwich in hand, and she heard that Jack Pearce – this was before he took on the kunya, or adopted name, of Abu Mujahid al-Britani – had fled. His name had faded from public consciousness, but for a few days he had been, like Fletcher, Britain’s most wanted man. Pearce, a recent convert to Islam, had been the leader of a terror cell based in the West Midlands and had been on trial for conspiracy to murder, and the evidence against them was robust. Yet while the accomplices had gone down, Jack Pearce had been acquitted.