Edward texted Jordan Callintree.
Helicopters?
The detective replied immediately.
London have arrived. MI5, army, even the Met. Expect hundreds literally. Police chief in trouble.
Edward resisted asking any follow-up. Douglas had appeared in the control suite next door and was visible through the thickened panes of glass. He was making a circle shape with his hands which Melody and Edward stared at in puzzlement. Alfie was talking from the site, describing the arrival of soldiers. In Edward’s headphones, Douglas Aspinall’s voice came: ‘Vinyl. Record. I’m making a record shape. Have put one in for you.’
Certain songs did not run the risk of being inappropriate, whatever the context. ‘Fields of Gold’ by Sting. ‘Angel’ by Sarah McLachlan. ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac. Douglas had loaded Sting. Alfie was talking about people in hazmat suits coming out of a van on the promenade.
‘How can you see all this?’ Edward asked, knowing the young reporter was at least a hundred yards back.
Alfie’s voice was permanently high-volume, but a monotone, as if he was a bagpipe with a leak. Edward imagined the young man reading a bus timetable with the same urgency – ‘THE NUMBER 38 IS DUE IN EIGHT MINUTES BUT WON’T STOP OPPOSITE THE CHURCH’ – but it was far better to be engaged with a story than stupefied.
Alfie said loudly: ‘I brought my binoculars and I found a flat roof,’ and Edward was immediately filled with admiration. He had been like this once, insatiable for airtime.
‘Keep us posted. We play Sting now and will return to our normal programming after this. News on the hour …’ A loud, angry crackling in his headset made him correct. ‘News on the half-hour as well as we all come to terms with this. And thank you, Melody, for the last, what—’
‘Two hours,’ she helped, showing her teeth at the other microphone. ‘I pray for everyone and especially for the Lopezfamily and law enforcement who have to enter the building as everyone else runs out.’
The song came on. To Edward’s surprise, Douglas came in with a smile. The short man threw his arms out, which Melody mistook for an attempt to hug her. As she moved towards him to return the apparent hug, he backed off in horror. He turned to Edward and said, ‘Good job, boss.’
Boss! ‘Were people listening?’
‘Are you kidding? I think we had an hour where the whole world was listening. Our website crashed with people trying to access the live stream from the USA. And then,’ he said sadly, ‘well.’
‘Well?’ asked Melody.
‘Not possible to be exclusive for long these days.’ He held up a tablet, its screen glowing with a headline from Sky News. HOME SECRETARY PRESS CONFERENCE LIVE AT FOUR P.M.
The Sting record had only a minute to run. Douglas saw Edward glance at the timer on the digital player. ‘Don’t worry. Crispin has gone home – “I decided not to resign because I am proud of this station” – and Miriam Tamla is in. She’ll pick up after this record from 3B. God knows we need some Motown.’
‘I quite fancy a bath,’ said Edward.
‘Oh, you’ll stay I think,’ said Douglas. ‘We’ll need more from your police source.’
‘I’m not sure I can trouble him again tonight.’
‘They’re panicking,’ said Melody. She reached for her phone and read a story from Twitter. ‘“The police chief of Devon kept the nuclear material in her desk drawer and used chopsticks to move it around”. That’s literally the headline.’
‘Crikey,’ said Edward.
‘She’ll have to resign tomorrow, I should think, and that’ll be another story for you.’ Douglas looked utterly unmoved by his own brutal assessment. His mind must have made a logicaljump, because he said to Edward: ‘Don’t start thinking your show is safe as houses. You’ve done a good day’s work, but you still cost me hundreds of thousands with that damned Harpford Hall performance. But yes, that was a solid shift today. I want you both here till midnight. Can you do that for me? Broadcast live whenever you want. The rest of the time, aggregate the information that’s coming in. Alfie will stay on his rooftop with the binoculars, assuming no one shoots him.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘We just heard a terrible howl.’
Kim was at Stevie’s house. The sun was down. Her heart was in her mouth. She had listened to every second of the coverage on RTR-92. Her phone showed an alert from theSun’s website: CHOP LOOKS LIKELY FOR CHOPSTICKS COP, and she had tutted at how brutal the media were, punishing the investigator before the criminal had even been caught.
Stevie lived with her parents, Moira and Theo. Kim wanted to say ‘a vicar and his wife’, but Moira was so dominant and Theo so shrunken that the more appropriate description would be ‘a vicar’s wife and her husband’. Drab and damp, grey at the gills, the vicarage was lumpen, like the deliberately inconspicuous concrete outpost of an East German police station. The colourless bricks were speckled black as if hot tar had been flicked at them. The church had long since sold the original vicarage as a second home. Still, Moira and Theo had been loving (almost obsessively so) to their adopted daughter.
It was the vicar who had opened the door and spoken, before Kim had said anything. ‘She must have got a message upstairs.’
Moira and Theo were both grey-faced.
Moira said, ‘After she howled, I knocked on the door and got a volley of—’
