‘I want you to head up the team looking for Fletcher’s associates,’ said Gabriel. ‘And I want his sodding computer. Or at least an internet cafe where he hung out and did whatever people like him do – buy jackboots or browse for Nazi porn. Get the team together in an hour. In the absence of digital devices, we need old-fashioned detective work. I want every right-wing protest video from the last eighteen months – no, make that two years – and I want every pub and cafe in the whole sodding area visited. Get to it.’

Bose left and Gabriel leant back, buzzing with adrenaline. They were close now; she could sense it. Fletcher could be in the cells tonight if this went well and, from what Gabriel knew of him, there was a real chance they would get him to open up about the NRF and the people who recruited him. She closed her weary eyes for a second, and the numbers from the video file spun in her head, rotating like the symbols on the fruit machine she was allowed to play as a kid when her dad took her to the police social club. A underscore C. One underscore three. A of C. And the significance of the numbers dawned on her with a creeping horror. She sat bolt upright. It made sense and she needed Fletcher in the interview room as soon as possible.

#

New Scotland Yard, Victoria Embankment, London

By 7.30pm, the SO15 floor was thinning. Desks were being plunged into pools of darkness as energy-saving lights kept on by the movement of bodies flicked off.

It had been a hell of a day, thought Tennant. Two briefings with the senior team to catch up on progress, another to get an assessment on community tension. There’d been another COBRA, another press briefing at lunchtime and, just now, an update with the commissioner.

It seemed madness to talk about a nation’s mood, but Tennant sensed that something had changed in the last twenty-four hours. The latest National Community Tension Report was as pessimistic as he had ever seen it. Protests had sprung up across the country, and a couple had turned nasty. In Bradford, mostly Muslim protestors had thrown stones at police, while in Bristol a peace protest had erupted into a mini riot. Chilton Park seemed to have invigorated the extreme right too and there had been a surge in racist incidents and attacks on Muslims, particularly in white working-class areas.

At least the boss hadn’t asked about the press briefing, and he was relieved. Day two of a big story meant news desks were itching for new angles and new leads. They had run the obituaries and the pictures of the victims by lunchtime, and dug up background on Fletcher. The hacks had been door-knocking relatives, tracking down old school friends and dredging up his previous. But by the time of the press briefing outside New Scotland Yard at 3pm, the reporters had become restless. Most of their questions were predictable, but he had been thrown by a shout from the local London paper, ‘Is it right to have Sophie Gabriel on the case given her handling of the Isobel Harris shooting?’ He had given her fulsome praise, but he knew he had blanched.