âIs he all right?' asked Deacon. âGul?'
âI think so. Cuts and bruises, shock, and it didn't do his suit much good. But it's a warning, Jack. Not to him â to us. People are scared. And scared people do stupid things.'
Deacon glowered at him. âWhat do you want me to do about it?'
Sergeant McKinney was one of the few people in
Battle Alley Police Station who wasn't intimidated by Jack Deacon. He was older than Deacon, he'd been doing the job longer, and he was still in uniform because he chose to be. He'd seen scarier things than Deacon every day when he worked in Glasgow.
âWrap it up,' he said firmly. âUntil we can tell people the danger has passed, things like this are going to keep happening. In fact, they're going to get worse.'
He was on his way back to the stairs, but turned and said over his shoulder: âDo you know the really stupid part? Ashok Gul is a Hindu. He's about as likely to belong to al-Qaeda as you are.'
Â
Things only got worse after nightfall. All at once the bands of young men, and some of young women, who always hung about on street corners in the evening stopped looking merely idle and started to look menacing. After the Gul incident, the ones who felt most menaced were young Asians, who in consequence made a point of sticking together when they went out. The consequence of
that
was worried phone calls to Battle Alley about gangs of al-Qaeda bombers taking over the streets. It didn't matter how often Sergeant McKinney explained that that's not how bombers work, people were too nervous to listen. Police patrols saturated the town centre, keeping apart people whose mere proximity was making one another anxious.
That wasn't the only problem. Although two days remained of the school week, dozens of uneasy parents decided this was the perfect time to pay unscheduled visits
to out-of-town grannies. Dimmock had a perfectly good road system for all normal purposes, but the ebb-tide of people carriers heading anywhere that wasn't Dimmock soon turned into traffic jams.
As a catalyst to this volatile mix of genuine concern and unjustified panic, around midnight a bunch of teenagers had the bright idea â as bunches of teenagers will: there's no situation so fraught that it can't be made worse by a bunch of teenagers â of setting off some fireworks. Mayhem ensued. People stuck in traffic abandoned their cars and ran for shelter, and after that the traffic lights changed and changed in vain â nothing could move. The air was abuzz with the wails of exhausted children, frightened parents shouting instructions no one was in a position to carry out, and volleys of screams as triple-strength bangers went off in the side streets. The sounds melded and mounted to a crescendo that poured over the town in a tidal wave of fear.
Police reinforcements were drafted in from neighbouring towns. In a stroke of ruthless genius the normally mild-mannered Superintendent Fuller, senior officer at Battle Alley, commandeered a bulldozer to shift obstructing vehicles and get the traffic flowing again. The roving bands were shepherded homeward, the stranded were helped, the frightened were reassured and anyone found in possession of a bit of blue touch-paper was slung in the back of a police car. Gradually the chaos gave way to some semblance of order. By three-thirty in the morning the town was quiet.
Jack Deacon, who'd been directing traffic for the first
time in twenty years, slumped exhausted in Superintendent Fuller's office. âIt's official. They're all mad. We work for a community of lunatics.'
Fuller lacked the strength to smile. âGo home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow will be worse.'
Turning the media spotlight on Dimmock changed everything. It was no longer possible to weigh competing evils one against another. Public opinion demanded that
Something must be done
, even though there was no consensus as to what or how it would help.
It wasn't that anyone had done anything wrong. It was the job of
The Sentinel
to report what it knew, however disconcerting. It's the job of the national media to pick up the big stories. And it's the job of governments to protect their citizens against threats, so when the front desk at Battle Alley was inundated with phone calls from people demanding to know if the danger was real, if it was imminent and what the police were doing about it, the callers weren't doing anything wrong either.
With the superintendents too busy to talk, the sergeants fielded most of the calls â which is pretty much the way police stations work normally. They agreed on a tone of cautious reassurance, telling people that the risk of an attack is still a long way short of an actual attack and advising them to be watchful as they carried on with their normal routines. But even as they said it they knew they were wasting their breath.
Because to the people of Dimmock â to most people in the civilised world â the word
terrorism
that had once meant an IRA bomb in an English pub now conjured images of a city block in ruins. Of innocent, uninvolved, undeserving people slaughtered not by the handful, not by the score, but by the thousand. Of tall buildings full of men and women, most of whom had never done or wished harm on anyone, burning and falling.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and it's true. A powerful image etches itself on the retina as if with acid. But you can't tell a story with pictures. There are no nuances, no balance, often not much information. So people see and remember, but what they remember is â quite literally â a snapshot of a moment. A falling man who never lands.
The people phoning Battle Alley were desperate to know what they should do. They needed information and guidance. They turned to a bunch of mostly middle-aged men in blue serge because, say what you like about them when you've had a window broken, in a real emergency most people feel they can count on the police.
But they didn't want to hear that they should carry on as normal. They remembered the pictures and thought they were on the brink of an apocalypse. And though they listened attentively to what Sergeant McKinney and his colleagues told them, after they put the phone down and thought for a bit, and discussed it with their other halves, they all came to the same conclusion. They were getting the hell out of Dimmock. They packed clothes, dogs and â incomprehensibly â bottled water into their cars, locked
their houses and hit the road.
A properly organised evacuation proceeds at walking pace. The roads are full of cars with top speeds of a hundred miles an hour; but when the roads are
that
full the cars bump into one another and the drivers get out to argue. Quarter of a mile further back someone's engine overheats; and because they can't move, no one behind them can move either. Three miles an hour is about as fast as you can shift a big body of people, however urgent the need.
If it had been a proper evacuation, people would have been told which roads to take. In the absense of a plan, people living in the Woodgreen estate on the east side of Dimmock decided to visit relatives living in the West Country, and people living in the leafy suburbs on the west side of Dimmock thought they'd try their luck in Dover. They passed one another in the middle of town. But by lunchtime on Thursday it was taking anything up to an hour for two cars heading in opposite directions to get out of one another's sight.
By eight o'clock that morning Brodie had decided against taking Paddy to school. By nine she'd decided against going to her office. Daniel arrived at Chiffney Road at ten past: the chaos in town was such that even walking had taken him twice as long as usual.
âWhat do they think's going to happen?' demanded Brodie, watching the cars filling Chiffney Road in a doomed attempt to find a short cut out of town. âThe tallest structure in Dimmock is the monument in the park. I suppose you could fly a hang-glider into it, but it wouldn't
make much of a bang if you did. It's crazy! All these people would be much safer in their own houses than out on the roads, jammed in and at the mercy of idiots.'
âThey're frightened,' said Daniel simply. âThey're afraid that if they stay something terrible will happen to them. Of course they want to leave.'
âSomething terrible
will
happen,' agreed Brodie tersely. âThey'll
make
it happen.'
Â
âThis stupid town!' fumed Deacon. âThis stupid, stupid, ignorant,
stupid
town!'
He had no need to be so emphatic. No one was arguing.
â
Now
we've got an emergency! Before, we didn't have an emergency. We had a threat â which was probably contained, because two of the only three guys we know about are in custody and the other's dead. There's every chance that any real danger ended when Daoud hit the lino.
âBut do people heave a sigh of relief, congratulate us on a job well done and get on with their lives? Do they hell! First they blame us for not being psychic. Then they decide that some town where the police
haven't
thwarted a bomb plot is safer than one where they have. They all pile in their cars and play dodgems till the roads seize solid â and we can't get through, and the fire engines can't get through, and neither can the ambulances to treat all the heart attacks they've given themselves! They're stupid, all of them. They
deserve
to die.'
He didn't mean it. The last bit â he'd meant all the rest.
But everyone in the Battle Alley conference room knew, and when he wasn't this angry Deacon knew too, that if he had to he'd put his life on the line to save any one of those stupid little people whose names he neither knew nor wanted to, and to whom he found it difficult to be polite on Community Policing evenings.
âNo, they don't,' said the Assistant Chief Constable calmly. âThey deserve to be looked after by those of us whose wages they pay. And they need looking after
more
when they're scared than when they've got all their wits about them.'
Deacon muttered rebelliously. He wasn't muttering anything in particular, just muttering on principle. He didn't react well to authority.
âSo how do we handle it?' asked Superintendent Fuller. âI imagine a decision has been taken higher up?'
ACC (Crime) nodded, a shade ruefully. âWith all the publicity, we couldn't keep it tactical. We couldn't even keep it strategic. It's gone political.'
â
That'll
help,' Deacon muttered savagely.
âSo what do you want us to do?' asked Fuller patiently. âWe can shut the town down if we have to. That doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.'
Emily Blake blew out her cheeks unhappily. She knew as well as any of them that whatever counter-terrorism measures they took would hammer at the wedges splitting Dimmock's communities, and that schism was now the greatest danger facing the town. But people were demanding that
Something must be done
, and the difference between policemen and politicians is that politicians need
re-electing. Doing nothing isn't always an option, even when it's the right choice.
âWe're instituting a no-fly zone,' she said. âFifteen miles' radius of Dimmock. There are no airports in that circle, so it'll provide a lot of comfort for not much inconvenience. We want to stop vehicles parking outside any public buildings, or anywhere large numbers of people gather. We want you to divert all vehicles away from the town centre and keep them out until further notice. And we want â¦' She had the grace to hesitate.
âA curfew? Checkpoints? Photographic ID?' hazarded Superintendent Fuller; and Deacon suggested, âWe should nuke the bastards?' in a hopeful
sotto voce.
âYou're not helping, Jack,' said ACC with a kind of weary severity. âHouse-to-house searches, starting at Romney Road.'
That was it. That was where the harmless blue touch-paper met the innocuous match. What Higher Up had decided was that the ninety per cent of Dimmock's population who went red in the sun wouldn't feel safe until someone had looked under the beds of the ten per cent who didn't.
âYou want me to round up some foreigners to appease a bunch of mindless idiots?' asked Deacon baldly.
Blake's lips pursed tight. âI wouldn't put it quite like that, Jack, no. I'd say, we know that some of those foreigners were involved in a plot to inflict death and destruction on this town, and it's in everyone's interests â including all the foreigners who
weren't
involved â to make sure none of the conspirators escaped. I'd talk about regrettable necessities,
and apologise like crazy to those we've disturbed for no good reason. And I'd hope like hell to find someone in one of those Romney Road houses who's been up to something we can arrest him for, whether he knows anything about bomb plots or not.'
Superintendent Fuller wanted to say she was wrong, terribly wrong, but he couldn't. He didn't like what he was being asked to do, but he knew that in a crude way it would help. It would reassure those currently fleeing Dimmock that it was safe to return. It would prove to anyone who needed proof that those left in their Romney Road homes had nothing to hide. And if young Hussein from number 23 was still growing birdseed in his grandma's windowbox in the hope that some of it might be worth smoking, they could take him in for questioning in a squad car with the blues-and-twos going and call off the whole ignorant charade. By the time anyone realised the boy had been freed on bail and the worst he faced was his granny's wrath, nerves would be calmer all round.
But that wouldn't be the end of anything. âWe'll be accused of racism.'
âUndoubtedly,' agreed the ACC. âWe'll defend ourselves. The grim reality is that there are people out there right now who pose a significant threat to public safety, and by and large they look different to those they're threatening. Those are the facts â we can regret them as much as we like but we can't change them. You can't call it racism when it's caused by someone twirling a bloody great scimitar!'
âA lot of people live in and around Romney Road because it's handy for their mosque,' said Fuller quietly.
âIf we do as you suggest we're going to cause distress and anger in a lot of people who've never done anything to deserve it. We may not intend this as a racial or religious slur, but that's how it's going to feel.'
âI agree with everything you say,' said Blake. âExcept that it isn't a suggestion.'
Deacon was thinking it through. It was like watching the business end of a watermill: you could see the corn pouring in from above, the stones turning and the flour coming out underneath. You could see every cog moving, every gear changing. And there was a kind of magic to it, because none of those around him felt they could stop the process even though they didn't want it to continue to its natural conclusion.
âYou mean,' he growled at length, âyou want us to turn over Dimmock's Moslems not because you think it'll make the town any safer but because it'll make the rest of the population
feel
safer. And you want us to arrest someone â anyone, for anything â because you hope that will be seen as justifying an unnecessary and inflammatory operation.'
Fuller winced. âJack â¦'
But the Assistant Chief Constable interrupted him. âThat's right, Jack,' she said plainly. âThat's exactly what I want you to do. I want you to do it because it'll cause the maximum amount of distress to a vulnerable section of the community, result in letters to the Press and questions in Parliament, and â oh yes â it just might save some lives.'
They regarded one another over the conference table. It occurred to those sitting either side of them that ACC (Crime) Emily Blake and Detective Superintendent Jack
Deacon were more alike than probably either of them would care to acknowledge. Essentially, what they were doing was waiting to see who'd blink first.
It was Deacon. âYou'd better be right.'
âJack â every week I take decisions I have to be right about. This is just another.'
âExcept that it isn't, is it?' he said quietly. âYour decision.'
âNo,' she admitted. âThe decision wasn't mine. The job of carrying it out is. And it's your job to help.'
She could have appealed to his better nature, except she wasn't sure he had one. Instead she played the one card he could never trump. The job. Serving and protecting. Jack Deacon had no reservations about serving The People. It was the people who made up The People that he didn't like.
âAnd if we make things worse?'
âWe'll just have to try to make them as little worse as we possibly can.'