‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk to me about?’ Carol said, taking her hand back.
His eyelids flickered with tiredness. ‘Oh,’ he said slowly. ‘Now you come to mention it…’
‘Tony,’ John Brandon’s voice boomed from the doorway. ‘Congratulations. Fresh out of hospital and you’re doing our job for us. Well done.’ He shook Tony’s hand and pulled up a chair. ‘Now, Carol tells me we have something of a delicate situation on our hands. It might be helpful to have your input here. Carol?’
‘It seems we have an alternative scenario for Saturday’s bombing,’ she said. ‘Tony and DC McIntyre went to see Rachel Diamond yesterday. The widow of Benjamin Diamond, one of the stadium bomb victims. It had emerged that Mr Diamond’s company had links to Yousef Aziz’s family business. Tony had already raised doubts with me about whether this might be something other than a straightforward terrorist outrage, so when he asked if he could talk to Mrs Diamond about any possible connection between her husband and Yousef Aziz, I thought it would be worth pursuing. Tony?’
‘Rachel Diamond claimed she hadn’t been following the media coverage, and it occurred to me afterwards she might not have seen a photo of Aziz, and so she might not have realized something she’d seen and written off as completely innocent was in fact something quite different. So I went back to her house today with a photo of Aziz. She wasn’t there, but her son Lev was. He caught sight of the photo of Aziz and said, “Why have you got a photo of Mummy’s friend?” I didn’t press him in any way, I know the rules about juvenile witnesses. And he said that they’d met Aziz in the park and he’d bought him an ice cream. It dawned on me that there was a different explanation from either of the ones we’d been considering.’
Brandon looked worried. ‘CTC are not going to like this.’ he said.
‘Tough,’ Carol said. She hadn’t forgiven Brandon for what she still saw as spinelessness in the face of the enemy. ‘Tony?’
‘Yousef Aziz wasn’t a terrorist. He wasn’t a hit man either. He was a lover. He was snarled up in…forgive me for sounding like a bad tabloid headline, but there’s no other way to describe it than forbidden love. The son of a devout Muslim falls in love with a married Jewish woman. It’s not going to play well at home, is it? They’re both going to be cast out of their families and the businesses they’ve worked so hard to build.
‘I think Rachel was the brains behind it.’ He shook his head. ‘Actually, having spent some time with Rachel, I have a creepy suspicion that she went after Aziz with the sole intention of setting up what finally happened-killing two birds with one stone. But I’m getting ahead of myself.’ Brandon looked as if he wanted to be anywhere but with them. Undaunted, Tony carried on.
‘They’re having an affair. Aziz is head over heels in love, he’d do anything for her. And Rachel hits on a great idea. They fake a terrorist bombing. They’ll get rid of Benjamin without anyone suspecting the motive. Aziz also gets to strike a blow against the system that oppresses his people, because the people they’re blowing up are the rich bastards who despise the likes of him and his family.
‘What Aziz thinks is going to happen is this. He’s going to set the manual timer, get out of there before it blows, drive to the airport and be gone before anybody even starts to look for him. He’s going to go to Canada, which is a clever choice, because there are quite a lot of Asians there. Rachel is supposedly going to join him there-’
‘I hate to interrupt,’ Carol said, ‘but I have some information on that front. Stacey has traced a booking on a flight to Toronto next Friday for Rachel Diamond and her son Lev. And we’ve found a holiday rental company who leased a cottage for a month, starting on Saturday, to Rachel Diamond. Yousef Aziz had previously viewed the cottage on his computer. Both flight and cottage were paid for on her personal credit card. So Tony’s right. Whether she was planning to join Aziz or not, she had the bookings to demonstrate her intent.’
‘It’s very thin,’ Brandon said.
‘There’s more to be found,’ Carol said. ‘We’ll be able to trace the call to the remote-control timer. If she used her landline, it’ll be on her phone records. If she used a mobile, we’ll be able to find what mast it went through. I’m betting Stacey will be able to find some evidence on one of the Diamonds’ several computers. We’ll be talking to all the Diamonds’ friends. There must be someone who knew the marriage was in trouble. There always is. And now we know what we’re looking for, we’ll find witnesses who saw them together. And Tony will give evidence of what Lev said.’
‘Hearsay,’ Brandon said.
‘Actually, sir, I think this comes under one of the exceptions to the hearsay rule,’ Carol said politely.
Brandon shook his head. ‘I don’t like it, Carol. You think a jury’s going to buy the idea of a Jewish woman setting up her Muslim lover to kill himself and thirty-five other people, just to get rid of her husband? Why didn’t she just divorce him, like the rest of us do?’
‘Because she’s greedy,’ Tony said. And I know all about greedy women.
‘I want to arrest her, sir,’ Carol said. ‘On thirty-six counts of murder. Because if we don’t, as soon as her mother tells her what Lev said to Tony, she’ll be on the next plane out of here. And if you think what we’ve got is thin for an arrest, it won’t even get to first base on an extradition warrant.’
Brandon groaned, ‘I don’t like this, Carol. It feels like a fishing expedition.’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Brandon shouted.
Stacey walked in looking very pleased with herself. ‘I thought you’d want to see this,’ she said, laying the folder she carried on the table.
‘What’s this?’ Brandon asked.
The CSIs who turned over Aziz’s flat found a receipt for a Coke and a cake at the City Art Gallery on Friday morning. So we took the initiative and seized the CCTV footage from the café and the gallery. We’ve got the whole thing upstairs, but I thought you’d like to see the edited highlights now.’
Brandon flipped the file open and they all stared at the contents. The first photo showed Yousef Aziz sitting at a table reading the paper, Coke and cake in front of him. In the next shot, Rachel Diamond was approaching from behind carrying a newspaper. The next shot showed her putting the paper on the table in front of Yousef. In the final shot, she was beyond him, no longer carrying the paper. ‘Three points of contact between them,’ Carol said. ‘I say it’s definitely time to go fishing.’ Brandon still looked dubious, but he nodded his assent.
‘Look on the bright side, John,’ said Tony. This way you get to tell CTC to piss off.’
Three months later
A bright Sunday afternoon, a classic Northern England landscape of high moors and long valleys. A scarlet Ferrari convertible, top down, drifted along a single-track road that wound uphill to a high plateau. ‘Where are we going?’ Tony asked Carol. ‘And why are we going there in Kevin’s car?’
‘It really doesn’t matter how many times you ask, I’m not going to tell you till we get there.’
‘I hate surprises,’ he grumbled.
‘You’ll appreciate it,’ Carol said. ‘So stop whining.’
A couple of miles on, the road flattened out. On the moor, shooting blinds stuck out of the bracken and cotton grass like gun turrets on a ship. A track cut off to the right and Carol pulled up. She reached into the back seat and grabbed a backpack. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This is it.’