Chapter Two
Shaheen Ebadi was sat in a prison cell, distraught. He had been expelled from his home at 02:00am the previous morning and had spent the rest of the night in the station cell. He had been told he was under arrest for involvement in terrorism and conspiracy against the United Kingdom. He had been forced into a police car and driven across London until he arrived at the West End Police Station in which he had spent the rest of the night.
Shaheen had never once been in prison. He had never committed a single crime. But there he was, locked away in this puny cell. For the first hour he had been hysterical and had screamed out of the small barred window of the cell door. He begged them to release him. He told them he had done nothing wrong. Three hours later he was still sat in the cell. All his energy was drained and he appeared to be only the shell of a once great man.
Shaheen sat still in the corner of the cell, rocking gently back and forth when he heard a sound on the other side of the door. He sat up and turned his gaze up at the door. Hope flooded back though his body and for the first time that night and freedom felt only moments away.
He stood up and moved towards the door, pressing his ear against the cold metal frame in an attempt to listen to what was going on in the station. He heard some mild commotion and a series of thuds before once again his world was plunged into silence. He waited five minutes, ten minutes, before concluding that no one was coming for him. He turned away from the door and sat back down. It was a further 20 minutes until he heard another sound.
It was the sound of footsteps. And keys. Someone was coming his way. He could hear the sound of the keys rattling getting closer. Shaheen turned back towards the door, overcome with relief.
The person was right outside the door now. The footsteps had stopped. The key had entered the lock and was turning slowly and methodically. Shaheen watched as the lock was unlocked and the door was pulled open.
“Thank you! At last, am I free to go? Is everything…” Shaheen stopped. The man on the other side of the door was not a policeman. He was a man dressed in a suit, a man who Shaheen knew all too well.
“Hello Shaheen. I’m sorry. You are not free yet,” he said, slowly with an expressionless face. “We have one more job for you.”
*
Tom Fisher sat on the front step of what was left of the Cartman household. It was 7:00am but it felt much later and as the sun rose and people all across Britain awoke, Tom sat in silence, burning with rage and sadness.
Rescue teams and medical staff had arrived 30 minutes earlier and swept the house, saving anyone they could from the wreckage and treating the wounded. 7 officers were dead, 2 more critical and 12 others injured in the explosion. They were lucky to have found the bomb at all before it detonated.
And that’s what puzzled Tom the most. When the agent had found the bomb, the timer had read exactly one minute. It had been as if it had only started its deadly countdown just after its discovery. How could the planter of such a device of known of the exact time of discovery?
Unless the timer had been activated by movement of the bomb… Maybe the Agent had found it by moving the large dining table and this movement had caused the timer to begin. But the Agent couldn’t have moved the table by himself and from Tom’s memory the table had been left untouched in the exact position it had been found in.
Having come to a decision Tom stood up and marched speedily into the wreckage of the building. He walked meaningfully towards the remains of the table and straight past the officer who was examining the bomb casing.
“Excuse me Detective what…” started the officer but Tom ignored his questions and having stopped at the table he stood on the spot of where the bomb had sat and turned a full circle slowly around the room.
After a few seconds he stopped and marched across the floor to what used to be the corner of the room. He bent down onto his hands and knees and started pulling away the debris from the corner. Then he stopped and stood up slowly with a grim look on his face. In his hand he held a small circular device with several buttons on it.
“Everyone,” called Tom to the group of officers in front of him. “This is a very clever little device this is. It is a camera, a normal everyday video camera. A small one to be far but it is still a video camera. Most families these days buy them to take videos of holidays, their child’s first steps or all the other emotional and ‘precious’ moments of family life. When I first walked in the room this morning it was positioned on top of the cabinet pointed at the dining table. And I bet you if I get it to work now it will have recorded the entire events of the morning investigation and of the discovery of the bomb and the explosion. And if we look closer inside of it I bet my entire months salary that there is a transmitter sending the footage to a certain killer who has so far left us no clues.” Tom paused and looked around the room at the faces of his colleagues. “Who forgot to check the camera? Who didn’t check all the little gizmos and gadgets to see if any of them were any help with our investigation? They were watching us. They knew when to start the bomb. They planted it here so we would find it. They are warning us. They are testing us. They know everything we have done and found out! And they have murdered us… They have killed and been allowed to kill because we were caught off guard. They are one step ahead and we have nothing.” Tom looked down at the camera and stopped. A little green light was flashing in the corner of the lens.
“And they are watching us now…”
Emotion!!!!!
SHOW do not TELL, up to a point anyway. That's one of the fundamentals of writing.