– Did you specifically want to talk to a black officer?
– Specifically? No, not specifically. I suppose you’ll want a coffee. Is that coffee?
I stalked off to the counter. I don’t know why I was so annoyed.
Specifically
annoyed me. His not being Child annoyed me. The newspaper and the Red Bull annoyed me.
I bought him a second coffee, and a tea for myself. It cost a fortune.
– You’re a writer?
– Yes. A writer. Fiction. Not fact. Do you read?
He shrugged.
– I haven’t read any of yours I’m afraid.
– No. Well. No. Never mind. Why couldn’t Child make it?
He shrugged again.
– Some last minute thing. Family thing.
Right. He sat there stirring sugar into his coffee, a half smile on his face, his eyes sometimes drifting over the room, following people’s movements in some sort of police
surveillance
instinct. I took out a notebook and propped it up against the edge of the table so that he couldn’t read it.
I didn’t care, but I asked him what he did. What his duties were, how things were organized. The idiot had to think about some of it, correcting himself over the most basic things. I asked him how much he was paid and whether he was an alcoholic. He thought that was funny. I asked him whether he beat people up, lied, framed suspects, broke the law. His half smile stayed in place. His voice slowed a little sometimes, and he regarded me closely, as if I was a little interesting, but his politeness remained intact. Everything about him annoyed me more and more.
– People think you’re stupid.
– They do?
– Not you … specifically. Not necessarily. The police. The Met. Stupid, incompetent, dishonest, violent, crass, arrogant. Useless.
– Is that what you’re writing about?
I glanced at my notebook.
Borough. C.I.D. Serious Crime
Command. Death. Rape. Murder.
– No. I’m writing about terrorists.
– Ah.
– Were you around on 7/7?
He frowned. His smile disappeared. For a moment I had the horrible feeling that he was going to tell me that he’d been down in the tunnels. That he’d been first to the bus. That he’d held someone dying in his arms. That I knew nothing about anything.
– I was on leave, he muttered. Out of the country.
– My commiserations.
He scratched his nose, and the half smile returned.
– I’m writing about the Olympics. About a terrorist attack on the Olympics.
He nodded. He didn’t, to my fury, seem surprised.
– I’m not sure I can be much help with terrorism stuff.
– No. I know. I know that. I’m meeting with some
anti-terrorist
officers next week to discuss that side of things.
I barely even paused over my own lie. I have no idea where it came from. He glanced at me. Nodded again. A little
hesitantly
.
– I had been thinking of using you, or Child I suppose, or some other
’umble copper
, as the basis of a character, my central character, my hero.
His half smile was infuriating. It hovered over his face indecisively, ready to fall one way or the other. It left all his options open, committed him to nothing, offered nothing, and waited for me to make another move. It was a police-
helicopter
smile.
– An ordinary policeman who stumbles over the plot, and who, against the odds, with no one listening to him, no one believing him, etc, becomes the hero of the story, stopping the bad guys at the last minute, saving the Olympics, saving London.
– Nice, he said, his expression unchanged.
Nice. He was mocking me. His face remained blandly polite. There was nothing you could point to in his voice or his demeanour or his eyes, but he was mocking me.
– But I don’t think I will, now, frankly. I can’t imagine you stopping anything very much.
The partial smile stayed where it was, but the head tilted a fraction, and something tensed across his shoulders, or his chest. His shirt seemed to snap to attention.
– Sorry to disappoint, he said quietly, levelly.
I had not spoken to anyone since Lloyd Page.
– We all love a hero, of course. But we all hate a hero too. You know? No one wants the bad guys to win, but everyone wants the bad guys to win. You know? You won’t understand. Policemen never understand. Policemen chase. Policemen arrive afterwards. You don’t have the choice. We have the choice. The rest of us have the choice. We decide when you get the call. We wait a little, see what happens. And as soon as you get the call, you don’t have a choice.
He just nodded.
– Every writer in London seems to be writing about the Olympics. I’m the first one you’ve met?
– Yes.
– Well, there’s a whole sleeper cell of thriller writers poking around the East End looking for ways to attack it, and looking for ways you can save it. What no one is doing though, what none of them seems able for …
I stopped and shut up. I looked at my hands.
I had realized what I wanted.
– I’m actually going to do it.
– You are?
His smile seemed to grow a little. I leaned forward.
– No one expects it, do they? Because although we enjoy these stories, as stories, and though we thrill to them, and enjoy the tease of death and destruction, it never actually comes home to us does it? It never happens. You lot get there in the end. You find the shooter, you shoot the shooter, you defuse the bomb, you capture the bomber, you drop him in the sea, whatever. Not any more. Not now. How gloriously liberating, for all of us, if this time, just this one time, you don’t stop him. No more teasing. Here’s the real thing. Billy fucking Flint, rushing to the stadium, driving through the shut down Olympic City, the opening ceremony under way, driving full pelt towards the stadium, finally knowing how it’s going to be done, knowing what’s at stake, rushing in his squad car. Imagine it’s you. Detective Hawthorn, rushing towards the Olympic Stadium, knowing that if you don’t get there in time thousands are going to die in the explosions. And worse, that millions more will be put in danger because you know, you’ve found out that not only is this a big fucking bomb, but it’s dirty too. It’s dirty as hell. And if it goes off, not only will East London not be regenerated, it will be
uninhabitable
for generations. From poison back to poison. London will die.
You
know.
Only
you know. Only you can stop it. And you’re driving there in your squad car, and your partner, Detective Child, he’s taken a bullet and he’s on the back seat, and he’s urging you on. He’s bleeding to death on the back seat, urging you to get there, to make it. And every book reader and cinema goer in the world, every Londoner, every human being on the planet, is enjoying the tension and the blood and the bang smash car chase, because they expect you to make it. They tell themselves they want you to make it, but the bad part of them doesn’t. And they’re enjoying that little frisson of badness, because they fully expect you to make it no matter what they want. Because that’s how it works. Except this time. Because this time I’m in charge. And I don’t want you to make it, Detective Hawthorn. I don’t want you to make it. So you don’t. You don’t fucking make it. You turn your car into Olympic fucking Way or whatever they’re going to call it, in what used to be the arse end of Stratford, and you’re surrounded by the manicured parks and the shiny Norman Foster venues and the flags and the lights and the great dumb glory of London all laid out for the world to see, with the stadium looming up ahead of you, glowing in the summer evening, and you’re looking at it, and Child is bleeding on the back seat urging you on, and you know you have to make it, for your kids, for the future, and you look at the stadium, and you’re looking at it, and there is a flash, and a crunch, and half of it seems to lean, to shift, and then it falls, the thing falls, and you see the whole thing come down, in a roaring rush of twisted concrete and steel, punched through with fire and dead bodies, thousands of dead bodies. There is blood falling on your car. You’ve failed. You have failed. You didn’t make it. They’re all dead. Child is dead. And the air is stabbed through with poison. You can’t breathe. But you have to breathe. So you breathe. All of London breathes. And London is dead. Because you didn’t make it. Because you failed. You.
I stopped.
He stared at me. There was no trace of a smile. But there was something in his eyes. I didn’t know what it was. He cleared his throat. I expected him to say something. But he didn’t. He just looked at me.
– You see?
He nodded.
– Let’s hope, he said, very slowly, that it doesn’t come to that.
I was
on
now. On. I could taste blood in the water and my darkest muscles were humming. Darkness guided me. Darkness lit the way.
I gathered intelligence and sketched out the set pieces. Plot. Structure. Scenes. I wanted them to simply exist, for now. To become discreet units, blocks, which I could arrange and rearrange, shifting then into shapes which moved forward and doubled back; which revealed and obscured; which hinted at success for one side or the other; which indulged confusion; which suggested the existence of other variables, other sides; which assumed the presence of something infinitely more complicated than any single scene might suggest on its own; which created, continuously, an increase of tension with small plateaus of intermediary action, death and violent release. The parts had to be small, subtle, precise; the assembly clever and efficient.
I gathered. I made lists. I examined the maps and plans of the Olympic site. I investigated transport links,
accommodation
areas, the anticipated movements of the public, the timings and location of events. I paid particular attention to vehicles. I spent a long time investigating the manufacture and specifications of black cabs.
I worked either at home or in the British Library. I rose early in the mornings, and worked grimly, angrily, for most of the day. I made sorties to various locations, taking photographs on a small digital camera, learning how to understand a junction or a crossroads or a train station by watching – from a point of stillness – the movements of people and vehicles, the disposition of the staff, the arrangement of the security devices. The patterns are there. They are predictable. They can be interrupted. I began to lose weight.
It is difficult to move through the city without leaving a trace. My Oyster card became an annoyance. It was registered in my name and after a while I left it at home. I bought a new one, unregistered, which I topped up with cash at machines in the stations. I stopped using my credit card. I used cash
everywhere.
Of course, I still had to withdraw cash using my debit card. But I limited this to the one machine, nearest my flat. I wondered about the cameras. There are cameras everywhere.
I investigated pay phones, phone boxes, public phones, phone cards. I talked to the guys at the corner shop about phone cards. They explained to me how they worked, who bought them, how they were more or less geographically weighted. This one for North Africa, this one for Central Africa, this one for Eastern Europe, this one for the Middle East, this one for Asia. I bought a couple of cards. I spent time in a few boxes near home. I dialled random numbers,
variations
on numbers I found on the internet for various businesses that I barely understood the purpose of, and sometimes the numbers themselves, to get an idea about the sound quality, the language, the way in which a Beirut florist becomes exasperated, or how an accountant in Karachi shouts into a telephone. Every time I called Cairo there was an echoey hiss on the line as if the connection went back in time. My calls to Damascus failed to get through at all. It was absurd, expensive.
I travelled the tube. I wandered the stations. I imagined. I looked at the crowds as the train doors opened.
Now
. I looked at the tired workers, the school-kids, the elderly, the mothers with their children. I looked at the faces of confused tourists.
Now
. I stared at suitcases. I looked at the glass and metal.
Now
. Sometimes I would see a woman I liked. I would find myself waiting until she got off. But that was wrong. Do it
now
.
On the streets I stopped in doorways and hesitated at crossings and stood still in places where people do not stand still. I dropped my pace, changed my perspective. I slipped through the city.
I began to imagine that I was being followed. This caused me a gentle, grim pleasure. I did not really believe that I was being followed. Not really. But I could turn suddenly in the street and see someone veer. I could glance behind me at a pedestrian crossing and find someone who had been in the same tube carriage. As I hesitated at a corner, turned back on myself, I could see faces that registered surprise, or which hid it with an unnatural blankness. Sometimes I saw people in windows. In cars. Parked vans, workmen.
One morning as I sat at my desk in the British Library I looked up suddenly and saw something – a figure – slip behind a bookcase at the edge of the reading room, not far from where I was. There was something about the movement, something jerky, which made me think it entertainingly
suspicious
. I stood up and walked over there. There was a man, a young man, consulting a publishing catalogue in a narrow aisle. I considered him for a moment. He seemed lost in concentration. But I noticed that his eyes were not moving, and that the little finger of his left had was bouncing up and down on the page. Like a signal. I moved around him, consulted volumes on one side of him and the other. I went to the next aisle and stood opposite him, our heads level through the shelves. He never once looked at me. Never once. I drifted back to my desk. I wrote out a description of him. I looked up again and he was gone. Playing his role to perfection, he disappeared completely. I never saw him again.
Eventually, I paused long enough in my plotting to write a two page pitch. It fizzed like a fuse.