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  ‘And to be your investigator too. Your own private eye.’

  ‘Yes, if you put it like that.’

  ‘Snooping into my own community.’ She paused. ‘So some might say.’

  He turned on her. ‘Surely your intelligence would not allow you to say, or think, such a thing.’

  For the first time she saw a force within – and a calculating mind intent on dissolving her objections. Even so, there was a desperation in his request. She remembered her father’s words: ‘Perhaps he’s in trouble, he needs help.’ None of that diminished the immensity of what he was asking her; to step aside from her career path and take a risk both personal and professional.

  ‘Effectively, you’re inviting me to go rogue.’

  ‘Some might say that. But I am entitled to define my own legitimacy.’ He sat back on the bench, disengaging eyes, peering blankly into the distance, trying to keep his shoulders straight. She saw a man battling to overcome his fears, confronting something he had never been faced with before, no more bolts to shoot.

  He swivelled away from her towards the evening gloom. ‘I could have turned him down, you know.’

  ‘Who?’ She was bemused; the remark seemed so out of context.

  ‘Sayyid. The informant. Whoever it really is. He – she perhaps – gave me the option. I didn’t have to. I could have let it go by. Perhaps I should have.’ He suddenly seemed grieving over some loss or error; a fork in the road. This was something more than fear. Vulnerability – that’s what it was. A man, once wounded, who might be wounded again.

  ‘But you didn’t turn him down,’ she said softly.

  ‘No. No, I didn’t. You know why? I feel affronted. Personally affronted. It’s not just their country to protect. It’s my country too. All of ours.’

  She wanted to do something alien to her – to place an arm around his shoulder, to comfort him. She leant towards him, then stopped herself. ‘Are you afraid?’

  He stirred. ‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe our intelligence services shoot people in the head or drop them out of helicopters, or out of boats with lead in their boots. Or “disappear” them into cement mixers and car crushers or stuff them into suitcases or any of the other crude rubbish so beloved by the fantasists.’ He paused; the late breeze rustled leaves and stroked the pond. ‘My fear is different. It’s not for me, I’m getting on. It’s what there may be to find out. Not what may be about to happen, but what has happened. That there was some kind of more sophisticated… more invisible… evil.’

  She had an overwhelming, even oppressive, sense that this was the most important conversation of both their lives.

  ‘There was one other thing Sayyid indicated,’ he said. ‘If I move on what he’s given me, it must be fast. In his words, I – we – have to stay ahead of them. It’s immediate or not at all.’

  He stood up, plea made, apparently no more to say. He made to leave, then halted, looking down on her.

  ‘I know there’s risk. Perhaps danger too. Terrorists and those who fight to contain them occupy another place. Albeit on opposing sides, they breathe the same air. The rest of us get occasional sightings – most of us through the distorting filter of the screens we watch and the newspapers we read. But I promise you, even if you and I must now breathe that air, I will look after you. Judges are a protected species.’ A gentle smile softened him. ‘My protection extends to you. I will always be there.’ He turned and strode briskly away, allowing no reply.

  Morahan was uncertain whether he had done enough for Sara Shah to bite. He couldn’t remember the last time he had pushed so hard for something, surprising himself with the passion of his parting words. She was clearly perfect for the job. As she herself had said, there were other such young men, and women too, though very few, he suspected, to match her. But that was not the point.

  That evening, returning briefly to the Inquiry office, he unlocked the desk drawer containing the Sayyid material and took out not one, but two folders. He had told Sara an incomplete story, one that deliberately missed its next chapter. Three days after the first delivery, a further note from Sayyid had dropped through his front door, instructing him to collect a second delivery from a different graveyard.

  Morahan retrieved it without incident. This time the folder was thin, containing a single envelope. He’d wondered why Sayyid could not simply have dropped the envelope through his door. Perhaps, he reflected, it was because he was somewhere out there watching, making sure that he personally collected it.

  Inside the envelope was a folded A4 print-out of a photograph and profile of a newly recruited barrister at Knightly Court chambers. Morahan vaguely recognised the face and name – perhaps he had seen her in court or at a conference. Stapled to it was a brief note.

  This is the person you must recruit as your investigator. She has special knowledge and a connection which I will make clear to you when I know that you have recruited her. At that time, I will also give you a final folder of material.

  Please trust me when I say that this investigation is vital for preserving this nation as a law-abiding accountable democracy. Sayyid

  Sayyid’s tone and his assertion of some poison at the heart of the state chilled Morahan. Even more chillingly, he was now being asked to embroil a young woman into a project with unknown consequences and dangers without, he felt, being able to give her the reason why. It was one thing to tell her that he had been approached by an apparent whistleblower calling himself ‘Sayyid’; quite another to say that Sayyid had specifically pinpointed her as the route to whatever wrongdoing he wanted to expose.

  Yet, however much he disliked himself for it, however much he had found Sara Shah a sympathetic, intelligent woman, he must resist the urge to come clean and tell her everything. For now anyway.

  ‘What are you going to do, Sara?’ her father finally asked, as he sipped his coffee and she her peppermint tea in the kitchen.

  She’d explained the job offer but not the events described by Morahan that had led to it. She wished now that she had paraphrased his initial letter for her father, rather than allowed him to read it fully. If he ever knew the full circumstances, he would try to stop her.

  ‘What would you do in my shoes?’

  ‘How could I ever be in your shoes?’ he spluttered. ‘OK, let me ask this. Might it put you in danger?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ she smiled. It was her chance to row back. ‘He was being alarmist.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. So will it be good for your career? That’s the main thing.’

  She rose, walked round the table behind him, and gave the top of his shiny bald head a gentle kiss. ‘I love you, Dad. Time to think.’

  Two evenings later, mulling for the umpteenth time over the conversation on the Common, Sara sat at her desk staring out over the rooftops, sensing a door closing behind her. The question she’d raised at the very beginning lurked. Why her? Or rather, why only her? Yes, she did not underrate herself; yes, she could see how well-suited to it she must appear. But she was not the only one; to think that would not only be arrogant but untrue. Why was he so insistent?

  Over those forty-eight hours memories dogged her with an uncontrollable viciousness. Was it to remind her that she’d once before had her chance to intervene, to save innocent lives? That time she’d failed. Was this her second chance? If she opted out or delayed for a second time now, would those memories ever fade away? Would she be consumed by guilt for the rest of her life?

  She began to write the letter. Once it dropped through Morahan’s front door, there would be no turning back. As the thought sank in, she felt a first tinge of fear.

  She gathered herself and went downstairs.

  ‘Dad, would you mind driving round with a second letter? Same address.’

  He silenced the TV. ‘What did you decide?’

  ‘As you said, might be good for the career. So why not?’

  What mattered was that he should never fully know what she was stepping into, nor
Morahan’s fear of where it might lead.

  4

  Within an hour of her arrival at Knightly Court the next morning, another envelope addressed to Sara Shah and marked ‘Private and Confidential’ was hand-delivered. This one contained a typed letter on Inquiry notepaper, signed by Sir Francis Morahan himself, offering an initial three-month engagement as junior counsel; a contract from the Government Legal Department would arrive within twenty-four hours, proposing a start on the upcoming Monday. All Sara now had to do was make her confession to Ludovic Temple. Fortunately, or not, he was in chambers, not court. She knocked on his door.

  ‘Come!’

  She entered. He rose with a giant grin. ‘Sara, you don’t need to knock, you know that.’ She looked down at the letter in her hand and then her feet. He followed her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You remember that letter, Ludo?’

  His face sagged like a collapsed soufflé. ‘Hell, someone’s made you a better offer. I bloody knew it.’

  She looked up, the colour restored to her cheeks. ‘It’s not as bad as that.’

  She gave him a broad brush picture of Morahan’s initial letter and her unorthodox dealings with him since, though she did not speak of his secret information, nor its source.

  ‘Curious man, Francis Morahan,’ said Temple. ‘Something inscrutable, almost odd, about him. Never thought his resignation was what it seemed. Clever though. And affable enough. I wouldn’t have imagined him as a doer. Not in the way you’re now describing.’

  ‘He seems determined.’

  ‘Good for him. Give those rascals a kick up the posterior.’ He frowned. ‘But why you? Must be others he could get?’

  ‘I’ve asked myself – and him – that. He’s insistent.’

  Temple sighed. ‘Well, dammit, he’s right. You’re the best. But do you have to?’

  She worried about sounding pretentious. ‘I feel it’s my duty. He needs a specific job done. I said I’d give him three months, no more.’

  ‘Duty. Hmmm…’ He affected to examine her. She silently held his eye. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I think I do.’

  He spoke with an unusual tenderness. ‘Then you must do it. But stick to your guns and don’t get bogged down. These inquiries go on for ever. Do the job he wants and then come back.’

  ‘That’s a deal.’ She stuck her hand out and he formally shook it, both now at ease. ‘I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch, Ludo.’

  ‘It’s fine. Next week’s prep and I’m not back in court till the week after. I’ll grab Sheila instead.’

  ‘Not literally, I hope.’

  ‘Ha! Funny girl.’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘Just as well you’re the joker. We’re not allowed to laugh at that sort of thing any more, are we?’

  As instructed, Sara arrived the next Monday at the Inquiry offices at 9.15 a.m., having hung around to avoid being early. The tube journey, Tooting Broadway to Vauxhall via Stockwell, was a breeze after the twists and turns to the Temple. She was met at reception by the PA to the Secretary, a squat, bespectacled young man with straggly black hair who announced himself as Clovis Hobbs-Fanshawe and managed nervously to stretch out a hand to shake while forgetting the accompanying smile.

  Morahan, in a surprising and warm phone call over the weekend, had told Sara he’d chosen Pamela Bailly as the Inquiry Secretary – effectively its chief executive. She was a Treasury high-flier and therefore, he explained, not from a Department he might be investigating. He also said she was extraordinarily efficient. Sara wondered if Clovis had been terrorised by her. No doubt a bulging Oxbridge brain lurked behind his jumping eyes.

  As she was ushered by Clovis into the Secretary’s capacious office, Pamela Bailly sprang up and strode round her desk to offer a firm handshake. Brisk with an edge of brusqueness, tallish, trim, precise, a smart cut of auburn hair shaped to the neckline, she projected a force field of compressed energy. Sara suspected some of it was a cloak, though there was no obvious sign of brittleness on the sculpted red fingernails.

  ‘Welcome, Ms Shah, delighted to meet you.’

  ‘Do call me Sara.’

  ‘I will. Pamela.’ She paused. ‘Not Pam. So… you’re here to chivvy us along.’

  Sara smiled, determined to forge some form of bond. ‘I can see that no chivvying is needed.’

  ‘In some ways not. A great deal of information, research and expertise has been gathered but we’re still some way from formal hearings. Indeed, we’ve only just started the search for counsel. Now his Lordship appears to have pre-empted it.’

  ‘I think it’s more because he has some specific tasks in mind.’

  ‘That would appear to be between you and him.’ Was there an edge in her tone? As if her own special access to her Chairman was being disarranged? She seemed a woman for whom control was important. ‘At any rate,’ continued Pamela, ‘he seems to me a reinvigorated man and that is all to the good. We will all do everything we can to help you.’

  Sara chided herself for the suspicion. ‘I appreciate that.’

  ‘Shall we do the tour?’

  She led Sara out of her office, past Clovis’s gate-keeping desk and into an open-plan space. From six desks, six heads peered noiselessly up. Four further desks were empty. ‘This is the Secretariat,’ said Pamela nodding briefly to the upturned faces without introducing them. ‘Our junior counsel, Sara Shah.’ The murmur of hellos was almost inaudible. Sara noticed that, despite the nature of the Inquiry, only one face was Asian – a woman, probably in her late twenties, wearing a knee-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse, head uncovered. ‘The spare desks are for our distinguished panel members should they ever care to look in.’

  A corridor led off the open-plan area; Pamela led Sara through the first door on the right. An older woman, full bosomed with long, steel-grey hair tied in an imprecise bun, looked up.

  ‘Sylvia Labone, our archivist,’ said Pamela. ‘Meet Sara Shah, our new junior counsel.’

  Sylvia rose with a cough – ex-smoker, Sara immediately assumed. Maybe still – there was a yellowness on her fingers. ‘Good morning, Ms Shah.’ Her voice was throaty, confirming first impressions.

  ‘Sara, please.’ She looked around at long shelves of files on rails. ‘You’re the keeper of the secrets.’

  Sylvia scowled before degenerating into a further cough. ‘If only.’

  ‘We don’t have a prayer room per se,’ said Pamela, ‘but there might be an appropriate corner here in the library. I mentioned it to Sylvia.’

  You really are organised, thought Sara.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sylvia, ‘whenever you wish. Never mind me, I’ve seen and heard it all.’

  Sara followed Pamela along the corridor to an end door that revealed a large office with a broad walnut desk, leather chairs behind and in front, windows to left and right, and a long sofa running along the inside wall. To one side, the view was dominated by the four-square-mass of the American Embassy; to the other, across Nine Elms Road, stretches of the Thames were visible between designer riverside apartment blocks.

  ‘Sir Francis’s office,’ said Pamela. ‘It was his decision to base us here rather than Whitehall or anywhere near the Law courts. I think he felt across the river was more…’ she searched for the word, ‘appropriate for some of our potential witnesses.’ She inspected the sofa and puffed up its row of cushions. ‘He apologises. He’d wanted to be here in person for your arrival but the Home Secretary asked for a catch-up at the last minute.’

  ‘Geoff Atkinson,’ said Sara.

  ‘Yes.’ Her tone hinted at contempt. ‘You’ll find that Sir Francis has his own working pattern. He tends to stay late on Thursday evenings to catch up with the week. I believe he likes the undisturbed peace of a deserted office. I understand his wife shapes her social diary around that. As for everyone else, we’re a nine to six operation and that’s the way I prefer it. If you need to work late, we’ll give you your own key and code.’

  ‘I’d li
ke that option.’

  ‘As you will.’

  Pamela guided her back along the corridor to a side door they had passed. ‘Finally you. Legal.’ She knocked and entered an office of similar size to Morahan’s but with four desks, smaller windows and walls lined with book shelves. One desk was occupied.

  ‘Morning, Pamela.’

  ‘May I introduce Patrick Duke, Government Legal Department. In my view an inelegant change in terminology from Treasury Solicitors,’ said Pamela, again with that edge. ‘Patrick, this is Sara Shah. Sara, I’ll leave you in his hands.’ She bestowed a quick smile on them, turned on her heel and closed the door behind her.

  Patrick grinned and shook Sara’s hand. ‘She’s a piece of work.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Sara.

  ‘Welcome.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Tea would be lovely if you have it.’

  ‘I’m prepared. Builder’s, Earl Grey, peppermint, chamomile.’

  ‘Builder’s is good.’ His grin broadened and he strolled to a corner containing a kettle, cups and a mini-fridge. Though she was annoyed with herself for it, Sara couldn’t help her surprise. He was tall and thin. And black. Unequivocally black. She followed him to the mini-kitchen corner.

  ‘People tend to call me Paddy – rather a feeble joke from my days of incarceration at one of England’s great schools, which I’m afraid has stuck.’ He was well-spoken with a deep-voiced singer’s projection. ‘You know. A black paddy. Ha ha. You get a hit on two races in one. All terribly good-natured of course, old boy.’ With only a small stretch of his own accent he escalated to an exaggerated upper-class honk.