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
Set in Times. Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd
Cover design by Rose Cooper | www.rosecooper.com
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.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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
www.davidderbyshire.co.uk
or on Twitter
@dderbyshire
or Instagram
@dgderbyshire
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.
Her initial excitement at joining the queue for Notorious had quickly given way to boredom and then frustration as the skies had begun to unleash a fine but persistent drizzle. But now, finally near the front of this interminable line, the listlessness in Zahra’s stomach was being pushed aside by the blossoming of nervous anticipation.
Jawad, dressed in a lumberjack jacket and black jeans, was at the front of their group with her mother and Jawad’s friend Imran. Zahra was at the back, next to her closest friend Maryam.
‘You nervous?’ Maryam asked softly.
‘Nah.’ That was a lie, of course. The bravado with which she’d agreed to come to the park on her school’s inset day was wearing thin, but she did not want to lose face in front of her brother and particularly not in front of his friend. She sneaked a glance at Imran laughing effortlessly with her brother, with his immaculate hair and black leather jacket. And those eyes, those scintillating eyes, that always seemed to ignite when she approached.
The roller coaster screeched to a stop. A man in an emerald sweatshirt kicked at a pedal at the back of the train, releasing the restraints which flipped over the passengers’ heads, letting them clamber out on the opposite side from the queue. As the line surged again, Imran, Jawad and her mother walked into the stalls, ready to get on the next train. Zahra’s cousins and Jawad’s friends filled the rest of the stalls, leaving no space for her or Maryam.
Zahra’s mother turned to face her. An effervescent woman, always quick to laugh, she seemed somehow even more radiant surrounded by her family and their friends.
‘Sorry, love,’ she mouthed, ‘you get the next ride, we’ll wait at the exit.’
Zahra nodded. That was fine. She didn’t want her mum – or Imran – on the same ride anyway. She wasn’t convinced her language would be appropriate for her mother, and she was terrified that Imran would see her being sick.
#
On the platform, Gareth Fletcher flattened his oily hair and gave a thumbs up to the woman in the control cabin. At her command, the eight cars rolled out of the platform to be yanked up the slope to the first drop. Fletcher slipped his left hand into his trouser pocket to rest his fingers around the metal that lay invitingly inside.
Notorious had two trains running at once and Fletcher had ten seconds before the other rolled into the station. A gust of pine disinfectant filled his nostrils and his gaze fell upon a splatter of vomit next to the rail which the cleaners had overlooked. It wasn’t worth reporting, but it irritated him. Why couldn’t people do their jobs properly? Lazy bastards. Lazy black bastards, he added to himself, like a reflex.
He glanced down the track as the other train began to creep into the station and he slid his hand into his pocket again. The train was seven seconds away. Maybe this was the time. Then, as he surveyed the queue, he spotted a middle-aged Asian woman with a group of seven or eight young men and teenage girls. His heart leapt. The men were full of bravado, laughing and pushing each other, showing off in front of the girls. He kept watching. Indian? Maybe Pakistani or Bangladeshi? From the head coverings on the woman and two girls, they were probably Muslims, he thought. Fletcher watched for a few moments, then glanced around the other passengers waiting to board. No little kiddies. That was good. No coppers. No squaddies. No heroes.
And then the fire raged again, erupting from the pit of his stomach, ripping through his chest and into his head. He could feel his brain pushing out against the inside of his skull. Too many thoughts, and so much disgust. And this fire, that made him alive and sterilised his doubts and fears, it would soon start to purify the world.
The coaster rolled alongside the platform and juddered to a rest. Once the passengers were out of the carriage and through the exit gate, he pressed the button on the wall to open the stalls, allowing the next passengers to get into their seats. The Asian group were laughing as they settled down. The middle-aged woman couldn’t reach her restraint, so Fletcher tugged it into place for her. She thanked him and smiled. He smiled back. Nice eyes, he thought.
The fire was burning still, not as rampant as a moment ago, but still streaming through his arms and fingers. He’d never felt so vital. He had ultimate control over these people, over who would live and who would die. And after it was all over, he would take his place in history, one of the growing army of warriors who had stood up and fought to secure an existence for his people and a future for white children.
He watched the woman settle into the seat. Not now. Not until they’d been round one time. One last time.
#
The ride was so much worse than Zahra had imagined. The restraint was too tight, her back hurt and now it was pelting down.
As the car began the steep ascent, she screwed her eyes tight and was aware of nothing but the blast of bitter, wet air on her cheeks. The clanking stopped and Zahra knew she was at the top but resisted the urge to peek. Then her body was slammed into the seat and her stomach entered her head as she plummeted. She battled to hold her head still as the train looped and twisted and rolled, and then panicked as she realised she was momentarily upside down and only the restraint was stopping her from popping out of the car like a cork from a bottle.
And then it slowed and stopped with a jolt, and it was over.
She swore quietly. And again loudly. Maryam laughed.
‘Your face. Brilliant. Wish I had my phone.’
Zahra wiped away the beads of perspiration on her forehead and self-consciously adjusted her hijab. The coaster had come to a rest ten metres before the station on a flat section of track. The train in front – the one with her mother and brother and his mates – appeared to have stopped in the station, but passengers were still in their seats. Zahra’s eyes darted along the train to find Imran, but its headrests made it impossible to see the occupants clearly.
The guy in the emerald shirt was ambling up the platform alongside the train in front, bending over every few seconds. It looked like he was fiddling with something, Zahra thought. She squinted. The man had something in his hand.
And then someone screamed. It could have been Maryam. It could have been Zahra. Now that her senses had begun to gather, she could see clearly that the object in the man’s hand was a knife. At that moment, he lunged towards one of the passengers. An arc of something sloppy and dark flew up in the air and someone screamed again.
For a moment there was just the rushing of blood pumping around Zahra’s skull. She experienced a floating sensation, as if she was looking down on herself, clawing at the buckle and restraint. And then the true horror of what was happening in the carriages ahead of her crashed into her mind with a force that robbed her of breath. Her mum, her brothers, her friends, they were in the train in front, and they were trapped by the ride’s safety restraints. And that man was attacking them where they sat, unable to free themselves.
She cried out, breaking the silence and yanking her mind back into her body. Nausea welled in her guts. She tore at the buckle and opened it. But still the restraint wouldn’t budge.
The attendant leant forward again. Zahra couldn’t see who he was attacking, just the backs of their headrests and the very tops of their heads. A pair of hands flew upwards from the seat to push him away, and then, instinctively, their owner held them over their face in a futile gesture of defence. The man slashed the blade at the exposed part of their body under their arms. An animal howl filled Zahra’s ears.
Maryam’s eyes were wide open with terror. ‘Stop him,’ she yelled. Zahra wished she’d had the sense to call out too. The queue of passengers didn’t seem to have moved and the woman in the cabin was still in her seat. Couldn’t they see what was going on?
The man in the emerald shirt continued to move in slow motion. He stooped in front of the next car and again a hand reached out, fingers splayed, clearly the desperate attempt to stop him. But the hand met the knife and there was another jet of blood and, with it, a chunk of something fleshy.
Zahra’s heart pounded. Sweat was trickling down her back and her head was hot. And still the man kept moving down the train in front. Was that her mum? The train was too far away for her to see clearly, and her vision was blurred with the sweat she kept desperately trying to blink away. But it was a woman’s arm that had shot up and, for a second, she caught a chilling glimpse of her mother’s hijab.
Zahra cried out again, and then, finally, there was movement in the queue of people waiting in the stalls. A bald, middle-aged man yelled at his family to stand back, then dodged under the wooden barrier and picked up the pole the attendant had been using minutes before to check the height of the children on the ride.
‘Get back,’ the father shouted over the train. The attendant looked up and stopped, his hands by his side, his blade still gripped tightly. For a second, no one moved. Then he dropped the blade, which landed with a metallic clatter, and sprinted along the platform and through the exit gate that led to the rest of the park.
#
Fletcher felt only a crushing urge to run. He wasn’t supposed to run, that hadn’t been the plan. He was supposed to have stayed at the ride, singling out the Muslims first, but also targeting other Asians and blacks if he could, taking them out one by one until he was stopped by the police or the army or some have-a-go-hero, until he could fulfil his destiny as a martyr. For weeks he had thought of nothing apart from the moment when his suffering would finally be over, not in an empty gesture, but a statement so bold it would trigger an earthquake around the world. But surrounded by the gore and the blood, all those carefully drawn-out plans had evaporated. It was not that he wanted to live, he simply did not want to die, not there, not then.
No one was following as he sprinted, head down, through the rain. He pulled the sweatshirt over his head, noticing as he did that his hands were smeared crimson. He wiped them on the material before throwing it into a hedge. Free from his uniform, wearing a long-sleeved grey T-shirt, he pushed through the crowd, who were unaware of the raw, desperate scenes two hundred metres away, and made his way to the staff entrance.
The winter sun had finally emerged from the curtains of cloud and was casting honeyed beams of light on the theme park and the distant North Downs. It was beautiful. It was England at its most glorious and it was worth fighting for. Fletcher pulled out his key ring, fumbled with the padlock and then yanked his bike free from the rack. Raising a hand to the security guard as he passed, he cycled on, propelled by adrenaline and wild giddiness, around the barrier and out of the park.
DAY 1
Wednesday Afternoon
Chilton Park, Kent
Detective Superintendent Sophie Gabriel spotted the staff entrance to Chilton Park a fraction of a second after her driver passed it.
‘Bugger, it’s there – back there,’ she said. Her driver, Detective Sergeant Jorell Campbell, braked hard and swerved into a lay-by, using it to do an imprudent U-turn across four lanes before heading back up the road. Ten seconds later, he threw the Volvo around the corner into the narrow track, sending a water bottle tumbling across the back seat.
Campbell opened his window and waved his ID card at the rat-faced security man on the barrier and was ushered through, past two cars and a TV news van parked on the verge. Two journalists clutching notepads shouted out as they drove under the lifted barrier, but Gabriel didn’t catch the questions.