SEVEN

LONDON

DOWN IN THE TUNNEL, SOME HUNDRED YARDS FROM THE PLATFORM, arc-lights had been rigged up, illuminating the ruins of the carriage. The photograph Pagan had seen in Dublin hadn’t prepared him for the reality. The carriage, disengaged from the others that made up the train, lay on one side, crumpled, gashed, windowless. It might have been picked up and crushed in some massive iron fist. It resembled an insane sculpture, the work of a madman armed with blowlamps and dynamite. Rails, buckled in the blast, had been cut back by firemen; here and there you could see the stumps of twisted metal that remained.

Openings had been burned in the bodywork of the carriage, hatches through which the dead could be brought and carried back to the platform. Pagan had seen the body-bags laid out in depressing rows. He’d seen men examining the remains. There was a distinctive smell he didn’t want to identify: sickening and constant, deathly.

He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and shivered. It was cold and damp in the tunnel. He tried to picture the rush-hour crowd hurrying into the carriage, the suddenness of death. Would there have been an instant of recognition, a split second of shock? Or had the doomed passengers been engulfed before they realized anything? He shivered again. Forensic experts, those archaeologists of death, sifted the debris.

John Downey emerged from shadows. ‘I understand all this is your baby now,’ Downey said.

Pagan looked at Downey, at the absurd little moustache. Downey was a clod in Pagan’s book, a plodder with a nasty streak. He wore a drab overcoat and a dun scarf.

‘How many dead?’ Pagan asked.

‘A hundred and seven.’

‘And no survivors.’

Downey said, ‘Look at the bloody thing. How could anyone have lived through that?’

Pagan stepped closer to the carriage. ‘How’s identification going?’

‘Mainly we’re relying on people who think they had relatives on this train. Otherwise ED would be practically impossible. We’re talking about some serious burn victims. Also dismemberment.’

Dismemberment, Pagan thought. He considered how Downey had added the word almost as an afterthought.

‘Get me a list of the names so far,’ he said.

Downey took a handkerchief from his pocket. He blew his nose violently, then folded the handkerchief away. ‘Glad I’m out of it. Mind you, I don’t see why Nimmo brought you back. I thought you’d been put out to pasture.’

Pagan didn’t have the energy to rise to Downey’s bait. This animosity went back years, back to the time when Pagan, in pursuit of the man called Jig, had been given his own counter-terrorist empire within Special Branch. Downey, overlooked, had been sullen and resentful. When the section had later been dismantled, Downey and his pals were the first to crow. They celebrated the demise of Pagan’s dominion in a pub called The Sherlock Holmes near the Strand. They were said to have sung, just before closing time, Hit the Road, Frank. Pagan’s more recent diminishment at the hands of George Nimmo had been greeted with joy among Downey and his crowd. They disliked Pagan for a number of things – the way Martin Burr had favoured him, the casual clothes he wore, his taste in colourful shirts, the Camaro he drove, his inclination to do things his own way. Fuck them all, Pagan thought. Who needs petty envies, the whole cumbersome structure of begrudgery and hostility? Who needs the approval and acceptance of braying jackasses? This was no popularity contest. He had a job to do. The rest was bullshit.

Downey turned to look at Foxworth. He said to Pagan, ‘Hail hail, the gang’s all here. The terrible twosome. Laurel and Hardy.’

Foxie smiled thinly at Downey. ‘You’re a prat, Downey,’ he said.

Downey seemed to enjoy the insult. He laughed, his shoulders shook, a hoarse rattle rose from his throat. He coughed and said, ‘Well, lads. Make sure you don’t get your suits dirty. That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all.’ He wandered down the tunnel in the direction of the platform.

‘Sad sort of bastard,’ Foxie said.

Pagan had already dismissed John Downey from his mind. He stared at the carriage. He hoisted himself up and peered inside through one of the openings that had been carved by firemen. The carriage was still warm to touch despite the thousands of gallons of water that had been hosed over it.

He saw a shapeless tangle of black molten wires, seats that had dematerialized, melted plastic, bent metal, a single advertising card – an odd survivor of combustion, blackened and twisted – proclaiming the virtues of an employment agency. A charred garment of some kind was visible: you couldn’t tell what it might have been. Puddles of water glistened under the bright lights. Formless ashes suggested the remains of briefcases, purses, handbags, all half-submerged in water. He wondered what insignificant things the bags and purses had contained, the personal articles that make up somebody’s life, letters, hairpins, diaries, business cards, now scorched beyond reconstruction. The smell was harsher here; Pagan had a choking sensation. This place is a crematorium, he thought. Nobody could have lived through the smoke and flame, the unbearable intensity of heat.

He clambered down and stood alongside Foxie on the tracks. ‘Where the hell do we begin?’

Foxie watched the explosives experts for a moment. They worked with delicate concentration, fearful of destroying anything that might contain a clue. ‘I’d give anything for a passenger manifest,’ he remarked.

‘Nothing’s that simple.’ Pagan turned and walked back toward the platform. Foxie followed.

Downey was standing among the body-bags, surveying them like a bureaucrat whose business is death. Tables had been set up against the wall, phone lines installed. Now and then one of the phones would ring and a uniformed policeman would pick up. The platform was brightly lit and busy – cops, more forensics people, explosives gurus, London Transport brass who were anxious to have the tunnel cleared and normal service resumed, although they had far deeper anxieties, such as the matter of security throughout the system – a problem of insuperable dimensions. Pagan thought the whole place resembled a ghoulish excavation site.

He glanced at the men who were going through the remains in their hideous search. He found himself looking at one of the dead. He hadn’t intended to, but he was drawn down unwillingly into the sight. Blackened features, hair burned from flesh, clothes welded by heat to what was left of the corpse. Dear Christ, how could you even think of identifying anything like this?

‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ Downey asked. ‘Human pudding.’

Pagan said nothing.

‘Hope you’ve got the stomach for it. Here.’ Downey gave Pagan a sheet of paper. ‘Sixty-three identified so far. Some of them have already been shipped to the morgue.’

‘Have you checked them?’

‘Checked how?’

‘Do we have anything on any of them?’

‘I haven’t got that far yet,’ Downey said. ‘It’s bad enough dealing with all this, and the relatives, and the bloody press—’

‘You should have done a run on the names,’ Pagan said. ‘Simple procedure.’

‘Nothing’s simple in this inferno,’ said Downey, and fingered his moustache.

Pagan looked at the sheet. The names of the dead. Addresses. Why had they died? What unfathomable motive lay behind it? He felt sorrow. Lives snuffed out. He had an image of the carriage going into the tunnel. Very ordinary. People travelling home from work. A mundane Underground train moving as it did hundreds of times a day. But this time it was different, a coffin train.

‘What about eyewitnesses?’

‘During rush hour? Give me a break, Pagan. Nobody’s come forward to say they saw a madman carrying a bomb, if that’s what you mean. Hundreds of people, a mob – nobody sees anything in that situation.’

‘Somebody always sees something,’ Pagan said. ‘They just don’t know it.’

‘We ran a press release anyway. Published a phone number. We’ve had calls, but you know how that goes.’

‘I know how it goes,’ Pagan said.

Downey rattled change in his coat pockets. ‘Tragedy brings out this burning desire to help the law. So they call in and say they saw a suspicious man on the platform. And what do you mean by suspicious, madam? Well, he had a black beard and a kind of bolshie look. It’s thin soup.’

‘Sometimes you have to look very hard in that thin soup for a veggie,’ Pagan said.

‘A veggie,’ Downey remarked disdainfully. ‘What you want, Pagan, is a smoking gun, not a bloody bit of cauliflower. Do you need me around here?’

‘I doubt it.’

Downey touched his forelock in a sarcastic way, then walked away. Pagan studied the list in the off-chance that a name might yield up a meaning, an association, but he couldn’t find any connections. They were just names. He handed it to Foxworth, who scanned it a couple of times.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Pagan took the paper back, folded it, put it in his pocket. He walked to one of the tables where a young policewoman was talking on a telephone. She looked weary. She’d probably been here for hours. She had a large notepad in front of her, pages covered in meticulous handwriting.

Pagan waited until she’d hung up. ‘What’s coming in?’

She had several notepads on the table. She tapped one of them. ‘See for yourself, sir.’

Pagan picked up the pad, flicked the pages. The woman had dutifully written down every call she’d received, followed by a name and address to which was appended a brief summary of each message. Saw long-haired man with a suitcase on the platform. Noticed unusual skinhead. Saw three Jamaicans talking suspiciously. These messages revealed more about the callers than anything else. Prejudices and fears. Phobic dross. Worthless. What dread did people entertain in their locked houses in the suburbs? Pagan put the notepad down. He was flooded all at once with the enormity of the task, paperwork, false sightings, information that was dud, voices babbling in the ether.

The policewoman said, ‘I keep thinking the next call’s going to be something useful.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Pagan remarked. The numbing brutality of legwork. Putting together each tiny building-block of information in the hope of a grand design.

A grey-haired man who walked with a limp approached Pagan. He carried an untidy sheaf of papers and a stuffed black briefcase. He gave an impression of disorder, spillage, preoccupation. ‘Frank Pagan,’ he said. ‘I heard they were bringing you in on this. Good to see you back.’

The man was Dick McCluskey, an explosives expert. He had known Pagan for more than fifteen years. McCluskey was considered something of an anarchist who kept himself aloof from departmental politics. Pagan liked him for this alone. McCluskey had an intriguing hobby; he designed magical illusions. He constructed elaborate cabinets in which objects and people disappeared. Pagan wondered if he had a trick box that might spirit the wrecked carriage away.

‘What do you think?’ Pagan gestured toward the track, the lit mouth of the tunnel.

‘A small device with enormous power, obviously. It had to be concealed inside some kind of container. You don’t place anything that looks strange on a crowded tube. Too conspicuous.’

‘What kind of container?’

‘Something routine. A briefcase. Somebody’s bag. We’ve been running a few tests, so far not altogether conclusive. Remember, the initial explosion emitted an incredible blast of heat. If that didn’t kill all the people in the carriage, then fire and smoke did the rest. You know, the powers that be think I should have instant answers, but what they don’t consider is how damned hard it is to keep up with technology. Destruction spawns extraordinary technical advances. It attracts oddballs and psychos who just happen to be electronic geniuses. If they applied themselves to other fields, who knows what they might accomplish?’

‘Somebody placed the device in the carriage somewhere down the line, then got off—’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. Consider another hypothesis.’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘A kamikaze sort.’

Pagan nodded. ‘A human bomb. I don’t need human bombs, Dick.’

‘Think about it. Say you’re crazy, you’re suicidal, you’ve built a compact high-explosive gismo, you want to test it. More than that. Say you want to be at the suicidal epicentre of it. You want to feel it. Where’s a good place to do it? In the Tube. There’s no security. No baggage check. People come and go at will.’

‘I can’t stretch that far,’ Pagan said.

McCluskey moved away. ‘I’ll get in touch when I have something definite. See you.’

Pagan walked to the edge of the platform. A kamikaze. He didn’t believe that. He was aware of Foxie at his side.

‘Somebody blows up a carriage,’ Pagan said. ‘Why? Does he want to kill everybody inside? Does he have some kind of deranged grudge against a hundred people? I don’t see that. I can’t get my mind around that one.’

Foxie heard a note of frustration in Pagan’s voice. ‘Or was the bomber after just one person, Frank?’

‘And everybody else just happened to be in the way?’

‘It’s a consideration.’

Pagan pondered this a moment: it was the kind of idea that took you down inside an abyss of lunacy. What kind of mind would conjure such a scenario? A cold shadow crossed Pagan’s brain. ‘It’s not a consideration that appeals to me.’

‘Still. A possibility, Frank.’

‘Anything’s possible.’ He took the list of names from his pocket and handed it to Foxworth.

‘Is Billy Ewing available?’ he asked. Ewing was an old associate, a Glaswegian with a permanent sinus problem. Sniffing Billy, reliable and loyal.

‘I can get him.’

‘Have him run these names, Foxie. Tell him he’s back on the team.’

Pagan looked in the direction of the tunnel. It suggested a large maleficent eye, unblinking, relentless. He saw his future down there. And he didn’t like it.

‘I need a few hours to myself,’ he said. ‘Before the fray.’

Foxie was not surprised by Pagan’s statement. He was accustomed to the fact that Frank, who had only a passing acquaintance with police orthodoxy, needed moments of privacy and contemplation before he decided his next course of action. There was at times something of the monk in Pagan’s character, Foxie thought – one a long way removed from Thomas Aquinas.

It was already dark by the time Pagan left the Underground station. He had Foxworth drive him home. He lived in a flat in Holland Park, nothing special, a couple of upstairs rooms that overlooked a square, a small park usually dense and green in summer but withered now, and uninviting. He unlocked the door and went inside, turned on the light. The air was stale. He stepped into the living-room, set his suitcase down and poured himself a glass of Auchentoshan, a Lowland malt he favoured. He sat in an armchair and looked round the room. On the mantelpiece were old photographs – himself and Roxanne on their wedding-day, an artless black and white shot of Roxanne he’d taken one afternoon in Regent’s Park, sunshine, wind in her hair, an enigmatic smile on her lips. On the walls were posters from historic rock concerts. The Rolling Stones at Wembley. Fats Domino at the London Palladium.

He sipped his drink slowly. Something about the apartment bothered him. Silence. The place needed noise. Let’s blow the cobwebs of quietness away. He sifted through his record collection – he hadn’t succumbed to the compact disc, didn’t believe in those smooth oily things, they lacked authenticity, they didn’t have the necessary scratchy quality – and he put a long-playing record on the turntable of his stereo. It was vintage rock and roll, Little Richard singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. Pagan found the comfort of the familiar in these raucous old tunes. He refused to give up his passion for the music. He wasn’t going to be swayed by New Wave or Rap or Grunge or whatever the flavour of the month was called. More than mere nostalgia sustained Pagan’s affection for the old rock. It was wild, liberating. It drove a stake through the heart of silence. Little Richard or Jerry Lee could dynamite a room.

Tracked by the hammering persistence of the music, he walked absently through the flat, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. In the bathtub he found a dead mouse, a desiccated little corpse. He picked it up by its brittle tail and held it.

He heard somebody knocking on his front door. He knew at once that it was Miss Gabler from the flat below. He opened the door. She stood clutching the collar of her robe to her throat.

‘You are playing your Negro music again,’ she said. She was fragile, seventyish, and had been raised in India, where her father had been some kind of colonial administrator. ‘I have had weeks of peace, Mr Pagan. Blessed weeks. I really must protest. My nerves are bad enough. I have my angina to consider.’ She spoke of her heart condition as if it were a neurotic pet she had to nurse.

Pagan was apologetic. ‘I’ll turn it down, Miss Gabler.’

‘I would understand it if you had less violent tastes, Mr Pagan. Some soothing Haydn, a little Mozart. I would not object to these.’

‘I’ll turn it down. Promise.’

‘Very well. See that you do.’ Miss Gabler still held her robe shut as if she thought there was some connection between ‘Negro music’ and a menace to her chastity.

Pagan held up the mouse close to the woman’s face. ‘Look what I found.’

‘Oh lord,’ said Miss Gabler, and stepped back, her mouth open.

‘In the bathtub no less. Poor little bastard.’

‘You have a cruel sense of humour.’ She flapped a hand, shuffled away. Her slippers flopped. ‘Some people,’ she remarked, more to herself than Pagan.

Smiling, Pagan shut the door. He liked Miss Gabler if only because she brought out a mischievous streak in him, a light-heartedness. He dumped the mouse in the garbage, then turned off the music. The silence rushed back in. He finished his drink just as his street-door buzzer made its customary rasping sound.

He went to the intercom and said, ‘Yeah?’

‘Frank Pagan?’ The voice that came up from the street was American. Pagan recognized the accent; the man was from one of the southern states, Alabama, Georgia. ‘My name’s Al Quarterman. From the US Embassy? I need to have a word.’

The US Embassy. Why? Pagan pressed the button that released the lock on the street door. He listened to his visitor climb the stairs. When he opened his apartment door, he saw a cadaverous man in his mid-forties. There was an air of ill health about Quarterman. He had dark mournful eyes and yellowy skin. In another age you might have said he was consumptive. He held out his hand, Pagan shook it. Quarterman’s fingers felt like unfleshed bone.

‘I don’t want to intrude on your privacy. I tried your office first. Your associate Foxie was reluctant to give me your address. It was like getting a bone away from a Doberman. He relented only when I explained why I needed to see you.’ Quarterman glanced round the room, saw the rock posters. ‘Hey, an aficionado. I go way back. Bill Haley and The Comets. “Rock Around the Clock.” When life was fun and games.’

‘I remember it,’ Pagan said. ‘Drink?’

‘Don’t mind if I do, Frank. Can I call you that?’

Pagan said he had no objection. He admired the easy familiarity of Americans. He poured two shots of Auchentoshan. He gave one to Quarterman, who said, ‘Here’s to lost youth and rock and roll,’ and tossed the drink back, unforgivably, in one gulp.

‘You ought to savour that, Al,’ Pagan said.

‘Is that the proper way?’

‘It is for me,’ Pagan said. He tasted the malt. It suggested peat, liquid smoke, heathery mysteries. ‘So. Why do you need to see me?’

Quarterman set his glass down on the coffee table. ‘One of our people is missing,’ he said. ‘He may have been on that tube.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, we’re not sure. And we hope to God we’re completely wrong. But he didn’t take his car to the Embassy when he came to work. He said something to one of the typists about how he wasn’t looking forward to going home on the Tube. And he isn’t answering his telephone. Consequently, it’s a possibility we have to consider.’ There was an expression of sad uncertainty on Quarterman’s face. ‘The Ambassador considers this a matter of protocol. We need to nail this down before you publish a list of the casualties. We don’t want Harcourt’s family to just come across his name in the newspapers or on TV. If he was on the Tube, the Ambassador feels we should be the first to deliver the information to the next of kin.’

‘Harcourt, did you say?’ Pagan asked.

‘Bryce Harcourt.’

Pagan found a pencil and wrote this down.

‘If Bryce was on the train, naturally we’d want to ship his remains back. His family …’ Quarterman looked at the bottle of Auchentoshan. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Help yourself.’

‘Damn fine stuff.’ Quarterman poured himself a generous glass. ‘His family would want him interred in Florida. The Harcourts are old and influential. Plus they’re personal friends of the President, which makes Harcourt’s death all the more … significant. If we don’t act as fast as we can and ship the body back – if there is a body – they’re bound to bring some pressure to bear on us. I’m sure you understand.’

‘It’s not going to be pleasant for them, I’m afraid.’

‘I figure that. Where are the victims being kept?’

‘At the station. A few have already been removed.’

‘I’ll send somebody around, see if we can’t make an ID. We have his records, of course, if we need them. Medical. Dental. The usual. They might prove useful in the event …’ Quarterman didn’t finish the sentence. He sipped his drink as he’d been instructed. ‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘These are early days.’

‘You don’t have any idea who perpetrated this?’

Perpetrated, Pagan thought. It was an antiseptic word. ‘Not yet.’ He drained his glass. His mind was foggy. He felt at one remove from his body. He longed for sleep, a couple of hours.

‘I imagine it’s a difficult operation,’ said Quarterman. ‘Do you have any leads? Anything valuable?’

Pagan shook his head. ‘We’ve hardly begun.’

‘I guess it’s like a godawful jigsaw puzzle.’

‘Except I don’t have any idea of what the finished picture looks like,’ Pagan said. ‘What did Harcourt do at the Embassy?’

‘He prepared background papers. If the Ambassador was to receive a visit from, let’s say, a company in Norwich interested in building a microchip plant in Des Moines or wherever, Harcourt would work up profiles of the company just so Ambassador Caan had some grasp. A research position basically. He worked directly under Caan.’ Quarterman looked into his drink. ‘We were quite close. We played indoor squash together. He was a sociable kind of guy. A party animal. Poor bastard.’

‘Maybe he wasn’t on the Tube,’ Pagan suggested.

‘Then where is he? He’s not the type to stay out of the office without calling in to say he’s sick. He’s conscientious. Even a little driven. I can’t imagine him going away without saying anything. His career was important to him.’

‘It’s still a possibility.’

‘Maybe. Look. If I can help, or if the Embassy can render any assistance, don’t hesitate. You can reach me at the Security section. Thanks for the scotch.’

Pagan walked Quarterman to the door and said good night. He heard Quarterman go down the stairs. Bryce Harcourt, possible victim. Another name for the list, for the roll-call of the dead. Pagan went inside his bedroom, sat on the bed, tried to collect stray thoughts and impressions and see if they might be moulded into a whole. But nothing came to him, he was empty; if he was blessed with a muse, it had abandoned him. As he stared up at the ceiling he remembered Foxworth’s unanswerable question: Was the bomber after just one person, Frank?