The Inquiry Read online

  WILL CAINE lives in South London. He is a BAFTA award-winning and highly-acclaimed investigative film-maker and journalist.

  He has spent much of his life delving into the secrets of state. The Inquiry is Will Caine’s first thriller.

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

  Copyright © Will Caine 2019

  Will Caine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008325633

  In memory of

  my brother-in-law James

  and his son Miles.

  ‘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 bus
es 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 M
uslim 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.