Later, the forensic pathologist would note that the entrance wound in Naomi’s back was the size and colour of a fresh cigarette burn. There was no exit wound – the solid knot of the hipbone had flattened and stopped the bullet.
People still get married at Gretna Green. Three and a half thousand couples a year. It’s a nod to the runaway weddings of the past when an eighteenth-century English law forbade anyone under the age of twenty-one to marry without their parents’ consent. Gretna Green was an accident of geography, the first village English couples reached when they crossed the border into Scotland. Overnight, a thriving wedding economysprang up, and businesses keep the tradition alive today. It’s romantic, a lovely way to start your new life together.
But when Naomi collapsed into her husband’s arms, her life’s egg timer was almost out of sand. A bridesmaid, thinking the heat and the heavy white dress had caused her friend to faint, went to help. Then she saw the blood. Lots of blood. She screamed. And then it seemed like everyone was screaming. It was a full minute before anyone thought to dial 999.
It wouldn’t have made any difference. By the time the paramedics arrived, Naomi had been dead for seventeen minutes.
The man in the ghillie suit didn’t make mistakes.
Chapter 3
Cabinet Office Briefing Room C, Whitehall, London
The murder of Naomi Etherington was the man in the ghillie suit’s third victim in eight days. In the last six months, he’d shot and killed seventeen people. He had a 100 per cent success rate. No one had survived. There was no one in hospital, hanging on, full of tubes and hooked up to twenty machines. Every one of his victims had died where they’d been shot.
Even if the sniper terrorising the country hadn’t been negatively affecting the economy, the prime minister couldn’t sit on his hands. He had to do something. He had tolead. And when the country looked to Number 10 for leadership, the quick-win, easy-to-arrange gesture was always the same – COBRA. It sounded like the PM was on top of the situation. That high-level coordination and decision-making was happening, and he was overseeing it. That when the country needed him, he was a hands-on prime minister. He wastheirguy. The public’s image of COBRA resembled the White House’s Situation Room. Screens on the wall, satellite links to the nuclear subs. Men in shirts, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up, toiling away day and night. That COBRA was an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms – the media added the A to make it sexier – didn’t seem to bother anyone. COBRA sounded fast. It sounded decisive. It sounded like it had bite. Like an actual cobra.
The reality of COBRA was that the prime minister was rarely present at the meetings. He might occasionally dip in and out, but that was more of a cosmetic thing. In case he was asked by the press or by the leader of the opposition at PMQs. COBRAmeetings are mostly attended by the people who need to be there.
Cabinet Office Briefing Room C was typical. It was functional. Utilitarian. Nothing in it that didn’t need to be there. It looked like any briefing room anywhere in the world. A table, some cheap chairs, and tough, hardwearing carpet tiles.
The seven previous meetings convened to discuss the sniper murders had been attended by representatives of the police, the Home Office, the Office of the Prime Minister and a bunch of civil contingency experts. The usual suspects.
And they were there now. Still making notes, still out of ideas. But this time someone new was in attendance. He’d been in the wings, ready for the call. Patiently waiting for the sniper to be redesignated as a threat to national security. He was called Alastor Locke, and although he looked and dressed like Snidely Whiplash without the top hat, he was one of the UK’s most senior spies. Locke had listened to what was being discussed in the meeting without commenting. The sniper was a police matter. He wasn’t sure there was a role for the security services yet. He’d made some notes but that was more out of habit. Locke didn’t attend meetings unbriefed.
The chair was called Timothy Spiggens and he was a junior minister in the Home Office. Not the best politician Locke had ever met, not the worst. He had just reached the last agenda item – AOB. Any Other Business.
‘Alastor,’ he said. ‘Can you bring everyone up to speed on what the security services have been up to?’
Fat chance, Locke thought but didn’t say.
‘The usual,’ he said. ‘Monitoring chatter, speaking to our friends, gross invasions of privacy, that kind of thing.’
‘And?’
Locke shrugged. ‘If he’s a bad actor, he’s working alone. No one is claiming responsibility. One of our more excitable far-right groups thought it might have been one of their fringe players, someone who disappeared a year ago, but I know for a fact they’re wrong.’
‘How?’
‘Because he’s dead. Drug overdose. His body went unclaimed and he was given a pauper’s funeral three months ago.’
‘But if you knew . . .’
‘If we knew who he was, why did his body go unclaimed?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re the security service,’ Locke said. ‘Keeping secrets is what we do. And it suits our purposes if certain groups believe we still do black sites and extraordinary renditions. It keeps them in check.’
‘It’s not terrorism then?’ Spiggens said.
‘It isn’t.’
Spiggens put his head in his hands for a moment. Terrorism would give the government a target. Someone to fight. A lone wolf gave them nothing. And Mason Dowbakin, the Right Honourable Member for Preston East, was already making waves. Goading the centrist PM, forcing him to move to his right. His latest column in theTelegraphsaid he was only helping the PM – who he admired greatly blah blah blah – return to his core values, but everyone knew he was setting himself up as the next cab off the rank should there be a leadership challenge.
‘This is a disaster,’ Spiggens said. He opened a slim file and removed a single sheet of paper. ‘These are the most recent figures. Working-from-home requests are up by six hundred per cent in the last two weeks alone, commuting is down by almost the same. When peopledocome into work, they don’t leave the building until they go home as soon as they finish, so the lunch and early evening economy is tanking. The public are cancelling hospital appointments so the pandemic backlog,instead of shrinking, is getting bigger.’ He put the sheet back in his file then picked up a copy of theDaily Mail. ‘A woman collapsed in Brighton yesterday. She lay on the pavement for over an hour before someone found the courage to go to her assistance. Eighty-seven years old and she died of heatstroke in one of the most advanced countries in the world.’ He slammed the newspaper on the table. ‘This is absolutely unacceptable!’
‘This isn’t a newspaper Mrs Locke has delivered,’ Locke said. ‘May I see it?’
