‘Stevie?’
At the other end he heard a dramatic clearing of throat. ‘Where’ve you been? I couldn’t reach you! It’s just so fucking shite, and excuse my French.’
‘I’m so sorry Stevie, I know how much you wanted the wedding to happen this Saturday.’
She sniffed again. ‘I kicked Roddy out. Kim showed me the truth of it. Anyways, I’m calling ’cause the victims had a briefing from the police but it was fucking useless. Can you tell me anything?’
‘God. I’m sorry for Roddy.’
‘Why would you feel sorry for him?’ she said, misunderstanding.
‘I’m sorry for you is what I mean.’
She did not rebuff the offer of sympathy, suggesting hurt she was hiding. ‘Have you got any news, Edward?’
‘I thought you might tell me.’
‘Fucking bastard Russians if it’s them. It’s all doom and gloom. Are you going to be in the church for the press thing? Can you ask them how long everyone has to isolate for? Just ask for me, as a mate? Don’t name me, obviously. It might be bloody years at this rate.’
‘I’ll ask, I promise.’ He wondered whether he could go to air simply with the phrase ‘doom and gloom’, but as his mind turned she sighed, long and loud. She sounded like a broken version of herself. ‘I’m so sorry, Stevie. My heart is breaking for you and I know Kim’s is too. The presser will be on the radio in full, you know?’
‘I’ve got the TV on and they’re just showing shots of the empty church.’
‘I’ve got to get down there. Hey,’ he said, ‘give me your number and Callintree’s if you can. My phone died.’
He wrote them down, and then she said: ‘I’m glad to help. Thanks, Edward, thanks for being my fucking friend.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner herself was at St Giles and St Nic’s. The church hushed when she tapped her microphone. A camera light fired up directly in front of her and she winced. Six officers sat either side of her. ‘It is six p.m. on Tuesday. The attack …’ She paused. ‘Theincidentin Sidmouth happened at two p.m. last Friday the sixteenth of May. A lot has happened in four days.’
Edward had arrived late, blaming Aspinall for holding him up. He walked in with the record function already running on Melody’s phone. A friendly face at the back of the church – one of the vergers, no less – had recognized him and whisked him fifty yards to a space at the left end of the front pew. Next to him was a bald man wearing thick-rimmed spectacles, with a forest of A4 paper spilling from his lap. The man kept turning his left hand as if operating an invisible dial, an annoying tic. He acknowledged Edward with a distant smile.
Facing forwards, Edward saw a flickering television screen with Jordan Callintree on it. The Devon policeman sat upright and attentive, as if he was part of the powerful panel the Met had deployed, but the TV monitor was small, the connection was patchy, and the set was propped against the front leg of thetrestle table. Most members of the audience would not even be able to see it.
The commissioner was the oldest person at the table, pushing sixty. Her face had the rough-hewn look of a woman who had fought her way to the top in a man’s world. She was unsmiling, motionless, her face set like cement, hair concrete blonde. A hat held everything in place. The only part of her that moved as she spoke was her lips.
‘My force have played out of their socks,’ she said. ‘When we were eventually alerted …’ The pause was silent condemnation of Devon’s farting around. ‘When we heard, we came running. We deployed for a terrorist attack on our homeland.’ Edward raised his eyebrows at the Americanism. ‘We were right to.’
A pause. Still the woman moved nothing, not even blinking, staring straight ahead. There were more than two hundred people in the church, and you could hear a pin drop.
‘I commend the investigations of our colleagues here in Devon and their … professionalism. They traced the bike licence to an address, giving us a name and a connection to Ukraine and possibly to Russia. We had a little more about the biker, but not much. After the work of a local scientist’ – ‘work’ sounding like another word for vandalism – ‘we had just the single intact ampoule left from the incident, and we then had the tragic death of Nina Lopez. May I ask that we now stand for a minute’s silence in memory of Nina?’
Edward stood in the pew, more slowly than the people around him because he was holding the phone, a notepad and a pen. For a minute he thought of his only child, his beloved Matty, who had died at eleven.
When they sat back down, the commissioner of the Met continued, ‘We now have a readout from the last remaining ampoule. If I may, I now bring in Dr Timothy Gregson, who is with the science and forensics branch of the Met and who has been liaising with our friends at Porton Down.’
Edward looked at the other twelve members of the panel for a clue as to who would be the scientist. But then the bald, bespectacled man in the space directly beside him got to his feet. ‘Hello everyone.’
He turned awkwardly in the narrow pew to face the congregation. All being well, RTR-92 would now be patching through the line they had run from the sound desk at the back of the church. The man’s left hand was still moving – the wrist rocking anti-clockwise and back again. He held the disorderly sheaf of A4 documents in his right hand, pinning them to his body with his right forearm, which was trembling slightly. For balance he placed a knee on the wooden pew.
‘To the science,’ he began. ‘I am a specialist in poisons, chemical devices, and, more broadly, forensics. Myself and my team have spent thirty-six hours analysing what was a tiny sample. I can confirm it was substantially radioactive. An isotope called Actinium-224.’
Dr Gregson paused as a gasp echoed around the church, reaching into his jacket and withdrawing a banana.
‘This is a banana.’ He waved it. ‘I appreciate people at the back can’t see it. But it certainly is. I use this in schools. A banana emits radiation – no need to worry! Every banana does. It is pulsing fifteen becquerels, a measure of radiation, virtually nothing. But nuclear substances vary in power. When Putin poisoned one of his enemies in London, Mr Litvinenko, he used polonium-210 which containedtwo billion becquerelsof radiation. This is why we had to identify the substance used at Toppings as a priority.
‘Regarding our measurement – there is alpha and beta radiation, but’ – he read the shifting bums in the crowd – ‘I won’t get into that. There are other units. Grays and sieverts, for example, measure human exposure. Grays measure the actual radiation taken in by a body.
