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Friday began warmer and drier than previous days, for which my back was grateful. Before I ate my breakfast, I looked in on the countertop test. The façades were dry, and all except the brownest appeared clean. But I pulled a fingertip across them, and it came up pale white. The deposit was chalky and, to some extent, tacky, and it took a bit of determination to clean it off my fingers.
If the purpose of our test were to discover whether a white chalky deposit could have been left behind, perhaps inadvertently, after an almost comprehensive scrubbing with an everyday domestic product, then the answer was clear. I left the countertops untouched so that Sandra could see for herself.
After I had eaten my bacon sandwich, I spent time looking from beginning to end through my files in search of articles about the encrypted communications between the conspirators and Ahmed Dastageer.
I found a piece in the Daily Mail called POLICE OBSERVED THE CONSPIRACY EVOLVE, THE
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IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 30
As the afternoon wore on, I tried to disregard the tick of the clock. But my anxiety continued to develop as I anticipated the likelihood of questioning Dr Jodie Smith, who was coming to see us, on my own without DCI Burton's necessary presence. Thankfully, Sandra arrived with ten minutes to spare, and I hugged her with sheer relief. Her presence made my questioning legal. I could not follow the route I was following without her right beside me. Shaking the professor by the hand, I said, "This is my friend DCI Sandra Burton." Sandra rose and shook Jodie's hand, and I gestured toward the other armchair. She was beautiful, with striking blonde shoulder-length hair and crystal blue eyes. Her waist was thin, her bust ample, and her legs languid and long. "Please, take a seat, Dr. Smith. Thank you for coming to see us today. You have saved us a trip to Manchester." Jodie smiled. "It's the least I could do," she said. "I was surprised to hea
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 31
On my way back from the door, I stopped and drew a fingertip across the countertops. "This residue is just as Nelson described it. What did you use?" "It's Cif. Your normal bog standard creamy white cleanser," Sandra said. "I used it to get rid of the much heavier product left by the first cleaner and I didn't rinse it off." "If nothing else, you have shown that the powder Nelson described could have been left in the Suffolk Street flat in exactly the same way. As for what the cleaning was intended to hide, we may never know the answer." "What about fingerprints?" "You could be right, we must be cautious in looking at inferences from poor evidence, but we are safe to assume that whoever killed Tina Davis wasn't wearing gloves at the time." "It seems a minor point." "And yet it could turn out to be a significant detail, and I am prepared to call the countertop experiment a success. You may keep carrying out your tests, but there
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 32
London was an unsafe place at the commencement of the G20 Conference, which brought together the economic brains of the planet's most influential countries, also got acts of objection. Police began expecting violent behaviour long beforehand the occasion, and from all developments, they were resolved not to be proved mistaken. Before the occasion, campaign coordinators aimed to organise a consultation with the Metropolitan Police to talk about procedures and the security of all concerned. But the police had more demanding difficulties, at least until The Guardian started asking awkward questions. A short debate was quickly assembled but created nothing significant. The Met were unconcerned in consulting with the demonstrators. Instead, they had their particular strategies. In order, they said, to safeguard London and avert any likely aggression, they would use a manoeuvre kettling, in which officers, equipped with batons and screens and esc
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 33
The morning after The Guardian displayed the mobile phone footage depicting Mark Dye's deadly attack on Harold Usher, a very odd series of incidents started to develop. It began when Mark Dye, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, arrived at No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Prime Minister and emerging from his car carrying dossiers. On the exterior of the dossiers was a marked paper secret, which summarised the prearranged seizures of a group of extremists in Manchester and Liverpool. Press photographers are constantly camped out near No. 10, with digital photographic cameras and telephoto lens systems. Dye understood the repercussions of his blunder straightaway, according to the article. Authorities progressed rapidly to censor any photos of the personal record if the accused heard of the proposal to seize them, while others quickly moved against the accused. Mark Dye hastily offered his letter of
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 34
I spent most of Sunday reading about an email one of the Bombers had swapped with a suspected al Qaeda contact in Islamabad, the capital, on the Potwar Plateau, 9 miles northeast of Rawalpindi, the former interim capital. The sender, identified only as "Z," had written chiefly about girls, weddings, parties, and cars. The messages didn't make any sense, according to MI5, unless they were in code. Journalist Steve Mann explained something about that code in The Telegraph: MI5 assumed that they used young women's names to refer to chemicals and that talk of a wedding ceremony was essentially a testimonial to the terror campaign itself. I was happy to find Mann's piece, but I still look for the email messages themselves. Later that night, I found what I was searching for in another editorial printed by The Telegraph. The first email printed in The Telegraph was sent in early December, from Z in Manchester to Islamabad: Dec 3 11.33 am
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 35
When Sandra woke up the next day, she discovered that I was already wide awake by at least an hour. My breakfast plate was empty, and I had started going through the morning's newspapers by this time. "Hello, darling," I said. "Thought I'd get an early start and carry-on trailing through the archives a bit." "Can I ask a few questions about what you have discovered while I eat?" She said, placing some slices of bread in the toaster. "Not at all," I replied. "Ask away." "Can you tell me about your dream?" she asked. "Not much," I answered. She sighed resignedly and then asked, "Tell me what you have discovered then?." "I have found out a lot," I said, "where do you want me to start?" "Last night, you declared the Bomber detectives under no circumstances find any explosives. No material that could be used to make explosives, and no weapons of any kind. Do you recall what, other than the trace of coded emails, the
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 36
"Have you heard of the Finchley Pizza Shop Sting?" I asked "I can't say I have," Sandra admitted. "Of all the tales I will you, this may be the most distressing. So I'll give you a hasty synopsis. The narrative turns around Indika Nuwan Karunaratne, a Sri Lankan refugee who lived in East Finchley and sustained his spouse and six offspring with the pizza shop, Pizza Palace. The pizza enterprise was not performing well, and Karunaratne had started considering ways to expand his money stream when Mahesh Theekshana began to visit. Mahesh drove a showy vehicle, sported extravagant attire, and carried plenty of money. He said he was a prosperous entrepreneur, and he appeared pretty approachable. So, one day Indika Nuwan Karunaratne asked Theekshana for an advance. This was the introduction Theekshana had been waiting for, and he conveyed the discussion to his supervisor, an MI5 agent. But, in truth, Mahesh Theekshana was not a prosperous entrepreneur but a crimina
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD 37
"One would ruminate," Sandra said, "that after such a public show of deceitfulness, Mahesh Theekshana would have been systematically disgraced." "But instead," I said, "he was welcomed as a hero, set up with an even larger financial plan, and sent out to grab more extremists." "Truly?" Sandra asked, "How come I haven't learnt something about all this?" "This case is all about distraction," I said, "and we've been led astray from the very start. Mahesh Theekshana emerged next in Claydon, a hamlet of Ipswich in Suffolk, where he began hovering around a mosque and performing in such a way that not a single person would have anything to do with him." "What was he doing?" "He began by going to the business office and asking for a list of followers. But the work force wouldn't give him one unless he showed a legitimate reason, and he never even tried to explain his demand. Instead, he began showing rolls of cash, proposing to buy people meals, give
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