Kitabı oku: «The Inquiry»

‘There were one or two big ones. That’s how we kept a lid on it for so long. But we were never fully sure about them. How could we be? They were from a different world.’

Ex-MI5 Officer, private conversation

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

2005

The ping of a phone. She jerks awake, grabs it, brings it close to her face, checks the time.

6.47 a.m.

Odd. No one messages her this early.

She lies back on her pillow, pulls up the duvet, clicks on ‘view’.

Don’t use the buses or tubes in London today.

She rubs sleep from her eyes. What the f— is this?

She scrolls down. Just a number. No name, no one in her contacts. She rechecks the number – nothing familiar about it.

She screws her eyes shut, kneads them with her knuckles, thinks. She hits reply, thumbs on keys.

Who is this?

She waits. After a few seconds, the phone pings again.

Message sending failed.

What is this? She clicks back on the message, hits ‘options’, adds the name as ‘Anon’ and the number to her contacts. She hits call. The ringtone is instantly interrupted by a woman’s voice. ‘The number you have dialled is unobtainable.’

Weird. Totally random. Has to be a mistake.

She gets up, washes, dresses, applies make-up, the everyday rhythms. The words still churn in her head. Butterflies jig in her stomach. She begins to realise she can’t get rid of the nagging thought.

What if the text is for real? And the sender’s chosen to vanish…

Stop imagining. It’s a rogue message – people get them all the time from all sorts of weirdos. She wonders how many others must have had it. Thousands probably – some madman trying to create a scare. That’s probably easy – a simple piece of code can do mass send-outs of texts.

Or just a sick joke from a sick mind.

She goes downstairs, makes her usual cup of coffee, toasts her usual slice of bread. She turns on the radio, volume low. All the chatter’s about London’s great victory the day before, winning the 2012 Olympics to be held in seven years’ time. She feels better.

The nag’s still there.

Should she show the text to her father? She goes back upstairs, creeps along the landing, peers in. Curtains drawn, no lights. He’s still asleep, she shouldn’t disturb him. Shouldn’t worry him. In her bedroom, she straightens the duvet, puffs her pillow, goes to the mirror to brush her hair. She looks out of the window. The line of terrace roofs is the same as always. A dog barks. She jumps, her heart thumps. She shakes her head violently to shift the nag.

Down in the hallway, she grabs her coat and stands stock still. The text is just… she comes back to the same word. Weird. What weirdo would send something like that?

Is there anyone she knows?

Just… just forget it. It’s a prank, some fool’s attempt to frighten.

Think. It must be nearly ten years since the last bomb went off in London, IRA, of course. Except for the nail bomber in Soho. Then there was 9/11 and the Madrid train last year. But whatever may happen in the rest of the world, this city, this country, is at peace. She’s not going to take any notice of it.

Perhaps it’s someone trying to organise a boycott, some kind of strike. Yes, her rational mind tells her, could well be that. Odd way to do it though.

She takes a deep breath, straightens her shoulders and, closing the front door behind her, strides out towards Tooting Bec underground station for the daily journey northwards to the Chambers where she’s just starting the law career that will be her life.

On the tube, it’s the same as always. Young couples chatting, eyes buried in books, ears plugged into Walkmans, mouths gaping with exhausted yawns. The carriage is filling to squeezing point. Drawing into Waterloo, she sees through the tube window a mass of faces waiting to crush her – a nightmarish canvas of every colour, scowling and grinning back at her.

The train jerks to a halt. Something hits her. She turns, sees a large rucksack on the back of a bearded young Asian. She catches his eye – he avoids hers. She goes on watching. His appearance – the neat haircut, trimmed beard – seems just like the photos of the 9/11 hijackers. She tries to remember if the Madrid train bombers used rucksacks to carry death. She has an overwhelming sense they did. Heat sears her face. She needs to get out.

The train stops, doors open. She pushes, the oncoming swarm miraculously divides to let her through. She pauses as the doors close and watches the carriages leave with their crammed human cargo. She walks, fighting for breath – the train grinds on towards King’s Cross.

It was just a young man with a rucksack, for God’s sake.

She crosses Hungerford Bridge and turns right along the river, the lightest of rain refreshing her. She looks around. Far to the west, beyond the pale grey hovering over the Thames, the sky is brighter. The day will clear. It will be the same as any other.

A bus on the opposite side of the Embankment, its passengers’ faces like polka dots, heads towards the city.

‘… buses or tubes…’

The buses and tubes are running normally. There’s no sign of any strike action – or boycott. No demonstrators or posters.

The nag becomes a throb.

At Chambers she is greeted with smiles. It seems that, even if everyone else here is white and English, they like her and want her for the youth and difference she’ll bring.

The clerk inspects her. ‘Are you OK?’ She detects his concern.

‘Yeah, fine,’ she smiles. What’s he noticed? ‘Just murder on the tube.’

What made her say that?

She wants to ask if anyone else got the same weird text that she did. But if none of them did, she can imagine them staring at her – who’s the weirdo here?

She sits at her desk, fires up her computer and begins to study her case files. She can’t concentrate, fingers sweating, slipping and sliding over keys. She feels the other three in her office watching her and looks up. Their heads are glued to screens. Instead, the face of that guy with the rucksack flashes before her.

It’s no good. It won’t go away. She looks at her watch – 9.21 am. Still most of the day to come. Surely loads of others must have got the text – the authorities probably know about it already. Even so, she should warn them, however nonsensical it might seem. But how? She’s a young Muslim woman – might that not raise questions? Cast suspicion on her? Might they want to interview her father? Even her new colleagues in Chambers?

Best if there was some kind of anonymous helpline. She’ll check for that on her computer. Head-down, concentrating on her search, she hears a distant sound. Sirens.

She hits a number for the Met’s confidential line and dials it.

She hears more sirens. She looks up – her office colleagues are hurrying towards a window. She’s seized by dread, stops dialling, puts the phone back. Is something happening?

She clicks on the BBC website. The 7th of July 2005. Nothing. The news is still all about the Olympics. The sirens are just an accident, a fire, usual thing, a day like any other, she repeats to herself.

She dials again. A recorded message tells her to hold on, someone will be with her very soon. ‘Please don’t hang up.’

Suddenly the BBC website flashes up ‘breaking news’.

First reports of a massive disturbance on London’s underground system

Slowly and silently, she puts down the phone and stares blankly ahead. A terror dawns.

Oh God. No. Surely not. Surely it couldn’t have been him.

Could it?

1

2019

Fourteen years later

Shortly before lunch on a bright, late spring day, Sir Francis Morahan, Lord Justice of Appeal, and now chair of the Inquiry into the security services’ record against terror attacks, hand-wrote a letter to Sara Shah, junior counsel at 14 Knightly Court Chambers, EC4. Despite the piercing sun, he took a grey woollen hat and matching gloves out of the bottom right drawer of his desk. Rather than his familiar grey coat, he then chose from the hooks behind his office door a waterproof yellow anorak, normally reserved for bad weather, and a broad white and red striped scarf. Carrying these under an arm, he turned right out of his office, avoiding the open-plan area housing the Inquiry’s staff, and descended by the back stairs to the underground car park. He unchained his bicycle, put on the anorak, wrapped the scarf around his nose and mouth, pulled the hat down over his forehead and extracted sunglasses from a trouser pocket.

He pedalled out of the exit, which faced the new American Embassy in Vauxhall, then two hundred yards along Nine Elms Lane before joining the Thames Path. Feeling pinpricks of sweat on skin tightly covered by his chosen clothing, he cycled past the MI6 building, through the tunnel beneath Lambeth roundabout and carried his bike up the steps to Westminster Bridge, avoiding the crowds milling around the London Eye. Across the bridge he turned onto the Embankment and, after a few hundred yards, north into Carmelite Street, just east of the Inns of Court.

The heat now stifling, and anxiety flooding his body, he turned into Knightly Court, locked the bike on the black railings, rang the bell of number fourteen, climbed the stairs and, with a mumble of ‘Letter for Miss Shah’ in his best south London accent, dropped his envelope in front of a receptionist. She hardly looked up.

Morahan scurried back down the stairs and reclaimed his bicycle; only when he had reached the south side of the river did he remove the scarf, hat and jacket. He had paused, though not by design, opposite the Houses of Parliament. For the first time in years, decades even – perhaps right back to that moment when his brief spell as an MP and then Cabinet Minister had begun with the General Election victory of 1997 – Francis Morahan buzzed with excitement and anticipation.

She was the link; the one person able to make the connection he needed. And yet, if he told her that, she would surely run away. He had shaken the dice and dared to roll them. But, for the game to start, Sara Shah must agree to play.

Later that afternoon, the addressee of Morahan’s envelope walked back from court to her Chambers with a senior QC.

‘He’s as bent as a coiled python,’ said Ludo Temple.

‘Hardly as deadly,’ said Sara Shah.

‘That’s not the point, he’s a crook.’

‘Do I really care?’ Striding side by side down Old Bailey, Sara turned sharply to the bulky, puffing figure on her right. Her bright blue Chanel scarf flicked over a shoulder and her teasing eyes cast him a look of mischief.

He stopped, caught his breath and glared. ‘A Ponzi scheme’s a Ponzi scheme.’

‘But a wine-selling Ponzi scheme…’

‘Yes, and it’s poor old buggers like… like what I’ll end up as, conned into thinking they’re buying bloody good claret without realising the pension’s going straight into the man’s pocket. And when they try to retrieve it, the whole lot’s been sold to finance his floating palace on the Med.’

‘So what? I don’t drink.’

‘I don’t say prayers five times a day.’

‘Ludovic!’

He knew that whenever she scolded him, he was near to overstepping the mark. But that was the fun of her – even if you did, she was quick to forgive; though he’d seen others shrivel under her silent raising of an eyebrow.

Over the past year, he had become ever more fond of Sara Shah – and ever more admiring. The greatest pleasure had been the change in his more cynical colleagues. ‘Let me get this clear, Ludo,’ Peter Alexander, Head of Chambers, had said at the chamber QCs’ meeting, convened to discuss her. ‘You want a Muslim human rights lawyer to join this criminal law chambers.’

‘Yes, Peter.’

‘And she wears a hijab.’

‘Yes, Peter, rather nice and expensive scarves as it happens. Blue usually.’

‘And you haven’t forgotten that our principal earnings come from fraud, in which she has little or no experience.’

‘No, Peter. She may have spent the last few years doing liberal luvvie stuff with Rainbow, but she began with criminal, including fraud, is well-grounded in all aspects of law, wants a change and is extremely clever. And extremely attractive too.’

‘Aha,’ piped up Percy Fairweather QC, rubbing his hands.

‘Stop it, Percy,’ said Amanda Fielding QC.

In fact, Amanda had been the main objector, saying she had no issue with either another woman – the more, the better – or a Muslim. But a Muslim woman covering up her hair was inappropriate for a chambers which should be seen as secular and progressive. ‘Honestly, Ludo, will she insist on looking like that for the website photo?’

‘Have a coffee with her,’ he’d said. Which Amanda had. She waived her objection almost before taking a sip.

Sara herself knew there would be undercurrents. She also knew why even the stuffier members of 14 Knightly Court might see an advantage in bringing her on board. Briefs for Serious Fraud Office and HMRC cases were by far the most lucrative Crown Prosecution activity for a top criminal QC; as the law tried to move with the times, having a visibly observant female Muslim on the team ticked useful boxes. And how helpful it was that British justice still required barristers to turn out in black robes and a wig – to dress modestly and cover their hair. In a courtroom, the secular state and the dress choice she’d made for herself happily co-existed.

‘You know me better than to expect an apology,’ smiled Ludo as they turned into Ludgate Hill.

‘I also know you well enough not to rise to it,’ said Sara.

‘But I was making a point,’ he continued. ‘I will never allow myself to feel sympathy for a man – or woman – I’m prosecuting. I couldn’t care less if they’re loveable old geezers, or if their victims deserved what was coming to them.’

‘What about when you’re defending them?’

His chuckle turned into a wheeze. ‘When I’m prosecuting, he’s a bad chap. When I’m defending, he’s a good chap.’ He paused to cough. ‘Hell’s bells, Sara, do you have to walk so darned fast?’

Knightly Court, at the eastern reaches of the Temple, lay equidistant between the Old Bailey and the Royal Courts, manageable walks even for Ludo. They entered No. 14 and climbed the gloomy, twisting stairs to the first floor, emerging into the broad light space of a modern reception. The receptionist stood to give Sara her envelope.

‘Delivered by courier, Miss Shah.’

Sara glanced at her hand-scrawled name and ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL’ written large on the top left corner.

‘Expecting something?’ asked Ludo with no attempt at hiding his curiosity.

‘No,’ said Sara. ‘I’ve no idea.’ He knew she was telling the truth.

She bypassed her office and headed for the ladies. The lengthening daylight hours made it easier for Asr – mid-afternoon prayer – as it followed the court rising. Zuhr – midday prayer – was more of an interruption and once again she had missed it. She would not leave court while it was in process and today’s lunch had been earmarked for an update with the instructing Crown solicitor – an opportunity to impress a hand that fed both her and her chambers. She would try to make it up, resist the urge to flag.

She locked the door of a cubicle containing both toilet and basin and washed her hands the required three times, gargled, cleaned her nose and rinsed her face, clearing away displaced flecks of eyeshadow and liner. Wudhu offered a double soothing – the preparatory cleansing was also a relaxation of the courtroom tension. She cradled water in her left hand and washed her right arm three times up to the elbow. She repeated the actions on the other side. She passed water over her head, wetting the skin behind her ears and neck. ‘Oh lord, make my face bright on the Day when the faces will turn dark.’ Finally, she removed her tights, sliding them below her three-quarter-length black skirt to bare her feet. One at a time, she raised each foot into the basin and submerged it, cleaning between her toes with her fingers.

She stood straight, inspected her eyes, saw the fatigue and sighed before heading back down the corridor into the chambers library. The rows of bound black volumes looked as untouched as ever – in these days of online research the room was a quiet retreat, and usually deserted when she wanted it for prayers; she suspected her new colleagues had been educated in the prayer calendar. The suspicion embarrassed her.

She thought of the exchange with Ludo and asked herself again if the switch from human rights campaigner to highly paid fraud specialist was corrupting her. The fact remained that she’d fallen out of love with too much of the human rights agenda – unable to repress an inner voice that Rainbow Chambers, and therefore she, had become prone to exploiting generously intended legislation. The sad truth was that rejected asylum seekers were often turned away for good reasons. She knew that in at least one case, perhaps more, she had represented ‘victims’ making false claims of British army brutality – and won. She’d come to worry that a realism about these sad people, born of too much experience, was chipping away at her humanity. She’d even started reading The Times ahead of the Guardian!

A move to fraud had been the right thing to do. If iron was entering her soul, better to direct it against hardened criminals, though she hadn’t yet had to defend one. She remembered Ludo’s ‘good chap’ and ‘bad chap’. Cynic or wit?

Stop thinking and pray. She faced east; the slanting sun cast sienna rays above the opposite building. ‘I intend to perform the four rakat fardh of the Salat Al-Asr for Allah.’ She paused, her mind cluttered, impossibly distracted, unable to slip into an automatic empathy with the words she was about to say. Perhaps if her father had drummed discipline into her in the way she’d seen with others, it would be easier. But Tariq Shah was not like that. For him it was cultural, not spiritual – something he and his family had always done. He occasionally looked in at mosque and, however sceptical he might be, wished no offence to Islam – nor any other religion. She had inherited the scepticism but not the temperament to relax with it; self-discipline was her only answer to both.

Ultimately, she told herself, emerging from the jumble of thoughts, it was her duty to her father that justified the professional move she’d made – the money to guarantee his comfort till the day he died. The comfort of this conclusion finally cleared her mind and she raised her arms over her chest. ‘Audhu billahi min-ash-shaytan -hir-rajeem, bismillah-hir-Rahman-hir-raheem.’

Ten minutes later, she was back in the room she shared at chambers with two other junior counsel. Marty Richards was out of London but Sheila Blackstone was there, make-up mirror angled towards full lips, to which she was applying copious layers of scarlet lipstick.

‘Sara darling, you caught me at it! Good day in court?’

‘Yes, fun,’ said Sara. ‘And utterly irresponsible. A wine fraudster. Who could care?’

‘Half the QCs in this Chambers will care a very great deal about that,’ said Sheila, eyes down on her mirror.

Sara hung her coat on a hook and looked at the hand-written envelope. She was tempted to chuck it in a bin – ‘Private and Confidential’ was probably shorthand for ‘I need a free favour’. But there was an edginess in the scrawled writing that stoked her curiosity; anyone sending begging letters would write more neatly. She caught Sheila’s inquisitive eye peering around the mirror, rose and left the room. She returned with the envelope to the ladies, the one guaranteed place of uninterrupted refuge, entered a cubicle and sat on the closed seat. She ripped it open. The printed heading was followed by the same scrawling hand-writing as on the envelope.

The Rt Hon Lord Justice Morahan

45 Chelsea Place Upper

London SW3 6BY

Monday evening

Dear Ms Shah

My apologies for writing to you in such an unusual way. You may remember that we met briefly in Cambridge two years ago at the ‘Human Rights: A Judge’s Role’ conference. I was most impressed with your contribution to that and also by your formidable record in this area.

You will be aware of the government Inquiry into security service strategy against terror which the incoming administration appointed me to chair last year. There is a missing expertise in the Inquiry which I believe you are uniquely qualified to provide. Formally speaking, this approach should be coming not from me but from the Government Legal Department which administers such matters. However, I have overwhelming and powerful reasons for initially speaking to you alone.

I would therefore be most grateful if, in the first instance, you would meet me privately. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that it is vital for my sake, if not yours, that this meeting is confidential and unobserved. I leave it to you to arrange a time and place that would suit these criteria. I can travel anonymously by bicycle. Anywhere within reach of Vauxhall Cross would be suitable. The meeting would be purely exploratory and you would be making no commitment by agreeing to it. However, I do not exaggerate when I say that truly vital matters of state and possible wrong-doing are at stake.

I would ask you to deliver your reply hand-written to the address above. I hope very much to hear from you with your arrangement.

Yours most sincerely

Francis Morahan

Sara stood up with a jerk, blood rushing from her head. Both the author’s identity and the fretfulness of the letter were a shock. She took a few deep breaths. Her thumping heart began to slow and the colour returned to her face. She wondered at how such perfect, concise sentences could emerge from such an apparently shaky hand. She didn’t dare to step out of the cubicle until she’d calmed down. It was the most disconcerting letter she had ever received, prompting a scattergun of questions and images. Chambers was not the place to confront them.

She walked back to her room; for once she was relieved to find Sheila gone. She stuffed the next day’s briefs and a sheaf of articles on cybercrime into her bag, grabbed her coat and headed for the exit. Ludo’s door was open – deliberately, she suspected.

‘Go on then,’ he grinned. ‘Something interesting?’

‘Really, Ludo, is not a lady’s privacy to be protected?’

He wasn’t buying it. ‘If it’s an offer, tell them to sod off. It’s my firm intention, Sara Shah, to clamp you in chains to 14 Knightly Court until my retiring day.’

She wandered over, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and headed out into the street, making for the Embankment. The sun was dipping beyond Big Ben and the skyscrapers of the new Vauxhall megacity. She crossed Waterloo Bridge, losing herself among the swathes of homeward-bound commuters. She found herself staring at the London Eye. The memory of that day – when it was still the new, exciting addition to the capital’s skyline called the Millennium Wheel – struck her like a smack of iced water.

She must snap out of it. London, her logical mind told her, remained safe. For well over a decade after 7/7 only one death, that of Lee Rigby, the soldier drummer hacked to death outside Woolwich barracks, had been the result of terrorism. Not just in the city but in Britain itself. Then came the van and knife attacks in central London; the bombing of a pop concert at Manchester Arena, lethally shattering the calm; the reminder that terror had not, and would not, go away.

Compared with other death tolls – road accidents, fires, polluted air – the figures remained, it seemed to Sara, insignificant. The ultimate victims were ordinary Muslims, tainted by association, fearful of hate-fuelled revenge. Yet, unable to shift the strangeness of Morahan’s scrawled letter from her mind, she found herself edgily inspecting the young Asian with the blue rucksack fidgeting in the corner of the underground carriage. When he stepped out of the train at Kennington, she was, despite herself, unable to prevent a flush of relief.

Back on Tooting Broadway, her mood changed. The Islamic Centre and halal butchers stood contentedly alongside trendy brunch cafés with eager central European waitresses and antipodean chefs. In this part of London few wore the full niqab and burka, but there were plenty of hijabis like herself. Some young Muslim women dressed in figure-hugging jeans and short-sleeved shirts; that was not her own choice now, but she never forgot the time when, all too briefly, she had also enjoyed that lifestyle.

She headed up the Broadway and into Webster Road with its terraces of small 1920s bow-fronted houses. A few sagged unloved, rotting window sills and yellowing streaks from overflowing pipes discolouring their whitewashed frontages. But most were spruced-up and clean, often with recently added porches and front doors proudly displaying their panelled multi-coloured glass. Her shrewd father had bought their house three years after she was born, during the heyday of Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy, a nest for the family he’d once hoped to grow.

She had been just eight years old when her mother had died – how distant it seemed. Not old enough truly to know her; or to ask her what she really believed. Would her mother, with the conviction of a convert’s faith, have seeded in her the certainty her father lacked? Whenever Sara occasionally referred to her, her father never seemed to want to engage; the answer was always a platitude. ‘Yes, your mother was always a good woman.’ ‘Always true to God.’ ‘So beautiful.’ ‘I never stopped loving her.’ It was territory he did not want to enter. After her death, the house had become father and daughter’s sanctuary. She never thought of leaving him, whatever the pressures to marry from aunts and cousins. With him to look after, how could she? The truth was that, far from being her burden, he was her excuse.

She turned her key in the front door Yale lock and it opened. Noisily – a signal to her father that she was home – she wiped her feet, hung up her coat and after a few seconds called, ‘Dad!’ No answer; he must have forgotten to double lock on his way out. Despite such lapses, his brain was in good order and she remembered it was his bridge evening at the Working Men’s Club up in Clapham. She smiled at the thought of him – his shortness, the little sticking-out tummy and the ever-present smile. A purist might have told him that card-play was un-Islamic; he would have joyously replied that it was a great Pakistani game, and Zia Mahmood the finest player the world had ever seen.

She went into the cramped kitchen, made herself tea and headed upstairs. After her mother’s death, he had knocked through the two rooms at the back to give her a bedroom-cum-study with her own shower room. She later realised it was his way of saying he never would, nor could, remarry. No more wives, no more children. Just him and her.

She removed her scarf, jacket and tailored black skirt she wore for work, replacing them with a loose blouse, cardigan and trousers. In the shower room she stared at herself in the mirror; the unblemished pale olive skin she was blessed with stared back. The odd line was forming on her forehead but the rest of her body from high cheekbones to slender ankles, was uncreased and lean – as photographs showed, the figure of her mother not her father. She rubbed her face with soap and warm water, patted it dry and returned to the bedroom. With half a sigh, she unstrapped her black holdall and lifted out the laptop and envelope containing Morahan’s letter. From her desk she looked out at the row of neighbouring back gardens – neat flowerbeds and patches of lawn interrupted occasionally by messes of dumped detritus. She booted up her laptop and typed in the two words ‘Morahan Inquiry’.