‘None, guv,’ DS Reichs told him. ‘But it’s been down there a long time.’

  Reichs had interrupted Manson’s interrogation of Macbeth to tell him the search teams in the EC4 tunnels had found a skeleton in one of the many rooms that lined the network.

  ‘Where was it found?’ Manson asked.

  ‘In the room they call the Shrine, sir,’ Reichs said. ‘Not seen it myself, but I’ve been told it’s old.’

  ‘Could be nothing to do with the Luddites then.’

  ‘Possible, yeah.’

  Manson breathed out and then said, ‘Do you know whether Macbeth’s boy’s here yet?’

  ‘He is, guv, yeah. With his mother and Mrs Hakim.’

  ‘Good,’ Manson said. Then he tipped his head towards the interview room he’d just left. ‘I’ll tell chummy, see what he has to say.’

  ‘What are you expecting, guv?’ Reichs asked.

  ‘I don’t rightly know,’ Manson said. ‘He claims the boy holds no interest for him.’

  ‘His own son?’

  ‘He, or Hobbs, killed Macbeth’s own newborn baby,’ Manson said. ‘Make no mistake Reichs, these people are indoctrinated in an ideology that is completely without humanity. Some would say brainwashed.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Don’t think he’s got too much to do with this lot,’ Manson said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  His phone rang, just as Lee Arnold was putting his head down for a kip. It was Gary Connor.

  Getting straight to the point, as was his custom, Gary said, ‘Mate, I’m hearing things about Colin Macbeth, that he’s been arrested.’

  Lee said, ‘Couldn’t possibly comment, Gary.’

  ‘Which means he has!’ Gary responded.

  Lee was glad that Gary had picked up on that. Deep down he was an alright bloke and Lee hated to think that he might receive negative push-back for something a distant relative of his brother’s stepmother might have done.

  ‘Fucking scumbags the Saints and the Macbeths,’ Gary continued. ‘Not gonna ask you why he’s been arrested, but I can imagine. And I tell you what, mate, if Fallon wants to stay with Dillon after this then he’s fucking welcome to her. I’ll have Harrison though, I’ll have my boy. I won’t let him be brought up by them bastards!’

  As he put the phone down, Lee wondered why Gary had phoned him in particular. Did Gary somehow know that Lee had been involved? But then thinking about it just made his head hurt. The East End grapevine was as mysterious as it was extensive and he had no doubt that, somewhere along the line, Gary Connor had infiltrated the police.

  Lee flopped himself back on his sofa again and tried to ignore the fact that Chronus was squawking at something outside the window. As soon as he’d got home, Lee had called Shazia, who had told him that she’d seen Mumtaz, who had told her to tell Lee he was not to worry about her. She was fine apparently. But even on the edge of some much-needed sleep, Lee’s thoughts were still on Mumtaz and, when he did finally wake up again, he had no doubt his thoughts would still be on her.

  The boy was so pale he was almost translucent. His mother, a dark-haired woman in her forties, looked as if she was at the end of her tether. With no make-up, her eyes looked black from lack of sleep, her face lined with the strain she had been put under by the men in her life.

  Manson had only had a few minutes to speak to her before he opened John’s interrogation. But just that small exposure had revealed her as a woman who had suffered greatly and who was hell-bent on getting as far away from her husband as she could.

  The approach Manson took with the boy was just to let him talk. Physically John still had some minor problems with his breathing and he was clearly exhausted, but in spite of that his story just rolled.

  ‘My dad was always a racist,’ he said.

  Manson had asked him to go back to the beginning of what he knew about his father and his membership of the Luddites.

  ‘But he was sort of almost like a comedy one, you know …’

  ‘Alf Garnett, I used to call him,’ his mother Jill put in, citing the famous character from an old BBC sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part. ‘Not that he was funny …’

  ‘I don’t know when he got in with the Luddites,’ John said. ‘I knew he’d been to BNP stuff in the past with my uncles and cousins, but he never talked about it much. He knew Mum would go mad if she found out, but I only knew that after he took me to Arthur’s house that first time.’

  ‘When was that?’ Manson asked.

  He shrugged. ‘About six months ago. Dad told me he was going to introduce me to some great people who would make us rich. I thought he was talking out of his arse, but I agreed to go because I didn’t want to upset him. Dad’s always been a bit of a loser which makes him upset, and when he gets upset he can get violent. He had a garage once but he screwed up his tax and had to sell it. He gave Mum a black eye.’

  Jill Macbeth put a hand over her mouth and briefly shook her head. Every copper going had seen this look a million times before. It was that of a woman who couldn’t believe she’d lived through that, who only now had the space to process her pain – and her guilt. Manson saw her place a hand on her son’s arm and then kiss his hair.

  ‘I know he used to be sorry when he took it out on Mum, but I’m not sure he is now,’ John continued. ‘They don’t like women, the Luddites. Women are just for sex.’

  ‘So there are no female Luddites?’ Manson asked.

  ‘There’s the woman who runs the pub, The Hobgoblin,’ John said. ‘Posh woman. But I don’t know that for sure. I saw her with Arthur a couple of times. But so when Dad took me to Arthur’s I didn’t like it. A load of old men talking about how much they hated black people and Asians and the French. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to upset Dad. But when he asked me to go the next time, I said I didn’t want to and that’s when things got bad.’

  ‘Bad in what way, John?’

  He shook his head. ‘He said if I didn’t go he’d do something.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Dunno, not really. But I thought he might take it out on Mum. So I went. It was messed up.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It’s a religion, although I don’t think it’s a real one,’ John said. ‘I’ve never heard of Lud. Some old English king. They all dress up to look like monks and Arthur gets them to drink blood. They tried to make me do it, but it tasted like shit. I spat it out.’

  ‘Human blood?’

  ‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘Probably. The next time I went they killed that baby.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Arthur.’

  ‘Are you sure about that, John?’

  ‘Yes. How can I forget it?’ he said and then he began to cry.

  The police arrived just as Danielle was about to call a taxi. She didn’t know who had shopped her, and found that she really didn’t care. Henry had gone to work after telling her he didn’t expect to see her when he got home. He’d cried. Not for her, but for the baby.

  All night long she’d watched the police pound the streets of EC4 from the spare bedroom window. Decorated to be the baby’s nursery, it only contained a cot and so when she did finally go to sleep it had been on the floor. When she’d woken up, Henry had told her to go. She’d asked him if he knew what all the police activity had been about and he’d just said, ‘Terrorism.’

  She’d switched on the TV after he left. All the news programmes seemed to be telling people was that a ‘terrorist threat’ had been neutralised in central London. They didn’t say what sort of threat and so she’d looked on social media. Twitter and Facebook were alive with conspiracy theories about Islamist terror cells and how ‘we’ could no longer tolerate ‘these people’ in our country. Was it possible Arthur and his men weren’t the target of the police operation? Was an Islamist terror cell also present in EC4?

  She knew deep down inside that it wasn’t. As Henry had said, she wasn’t a fool. She’d hated that woman with her slim figure and her posh voice. Arthur had told her they were everywhere and they were. They needed to be stopped. And yet … People like that woman were often the same people who stood up for women like her. There was a reason she’d been attracted to Henry that went beyond his good looks. There was a reason she found men like Arthur and his people unattractive. But it was confusing. On the few occasions she’d listened to her father she knew that he didn’t blame anyone for the inequality in society. He just blamed ‘the system’, which she had never sought to investigate because her old man had been such a lone voice.

  There were three officers at her door, two men and a woman. They told her she was being arrested under counter-terrorism legislation. Again her father’s image came to mind. He was going to be devastated.

  ‘Dad used the knife to smear blood on my face,’ John said.

  ‘But it was Hobbs who killed the child?’ Manson asked.

  ‘Yes. Dad didn’t. He watched but he didn’t kill her.’

  ‘What did you do when your dad smeared you with blood?’

  ‘I ran,’ John said. ‘I had to get out of there.’

  ‘Out of where?’

  ‘They call it the Shrine. It’s just a room where they have these ceremonies. The baby was a sacrifice to Lud. It was mad. I couldn’t be there! They’re all mad! It was like being in a horror movie …’

  His mother put her arms around him and said, ‘I should have—’

  ‘Mum, you couldn’t have done anything!’ he said. ‘He’s gone mad! He wanted me to die because I disappointed him! What do you think he would have done to you?’

  The room became silent and then Manson said, ‘John, do you have any idea about who the child was or where she came from?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Do you know how many people were in the Shrine with you when this happened?’

  He thought for a moment and then said, ‘Not really. Maybe about twenty? I don’t know.’

  ‘And did you recognise any of them?’

  ‘I’d seen some of them before, but I don’t know their names.’

  ‘Could you recognise any of them, do you think?’

  ‘Maybe …’

  ‘So when you ran,’ Manson continued, ‘where did you run?’

  ‘Down the tunnels,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I had to get out and tell somebody. I threw up somewhere. I could hear them behind me! Then I was at the front door and there were these two boys. They just stood there and looked at me like they’d seen a ghost or something.’

  ‘So why didn’t you leave?’

  The boy was silent for a moment and then he said, ‘Because when I looked behind me, I could see Arthur and I knew that Dad was behind him.’

  ‘Even so …’

  ‘I don’t know! I was so frightened! I don’t know what I thought then! Maybe I thought they’d kill those kids? I don’t know, I just shut the door.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  He shook his head again. ‘I went back with them,’ he said. ‘To the Shrine.’

  ‘Did you see …?’

  ‘Dad took it away then. I don’t know where he went. Arthur put me in a room and locked me in.’

  ‘Did you see your dad later?’

  ‘He came and explained how he was disappointed in me, yeah,’ John said. ‘He told me that I was going to have to stay with Arthur until I came to my senses.’

  ‘Colin told me John was with him,’ Jill Macbeth said.

  ‘And did you know where they’d gone?’ Manson asked.

  ‘Me and Colin split up a few weeks ago and all I knew was that he had a flat in Dagenham. It hadn’t been easy to get him out, but I didn’t want John to not see his dad. He still had a key to the house. I shouldn’t have been so trusting.’

  ‘I told Dad I could never be like him and the others. He lost his shit and shouted at me. He said soon everyone was going to be like him and anyone who wasn’t was going to die.’

  Manson said, ‘Your dad said that people would die?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyone not into the Lud thing I supposed.’ He put his head down. ‘I know Dad’s family have always been dodgy, but not like this. Far as I could tell, none of my uncles were down there. Nobody I know. Did Dad just lose his mind or …?’

  ‘My old dad knew about the tunnels, although he never said he’d been down,’ Wilko told DS Howard. ‘The old man knew a lot of things. He was a proper old-fashioned Londoner.’

  ‘Did your dad ever tell you what they were used for?’ Howard asked.

  ‘Lots of things. Mainly to do with the cathedral, he reckoned. In Queen Mary’s reign the Inquisition had cells down there. Some tunnels were used so clerics could get from the choir school to the church without having to walk through all the shit up in the streets. Dad was convinced that the tunnels were part of the Mithras Temple complex found at Mansion House in the fifties.’

  ‘That the Roman thing?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Mithras was a Persian god of war that Roman soldiers used to worship. Heavy on blood sacrifice. Me and George have talked about that a lot over the years.’

  ‘Father George Feldman.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The exorcist.’

  ‘Yup. And yes, I know …’

  ‘Talking to DS Pinker over at Bishopsgate this morning and she tells me Father George reckoned he spoke to a priest at the cathedral who thought the place had become “evil”. According to DS Pinker, she later discovered from cathedral staff that this priest was actually a ghost called Father Edward who turns up, they think, when the cathedral is under threat.’

  ‘Yeah, well …’

  ‘Sergeant Wilkinson, I work in counter-terrorism,’ Howard said. ‘Ghosts are the least of my worries and in fact, I find I’m more inclined to believe in them than I am in much of the so-called intel that comes my way. Now tell me about King Lud …’

  His dad had talked about Lud. Old King Lud the first, the past and future English king who had first seen off and then been defeated by the Romans, and who had come back as King Arthur and who would one day rise again. It was said that Lud demanded blood in the form of the Roman god Mithras when Albion was finally conquered by the Legions in 43 AD. Lud hadn’t actually ever been away, waiting in his temple down underneath the streets of London, looking for those who believed in him to come and revive the old religion again. Her Ladyship had been a mine of information about Lud. She knew everything. The police kept on asking him about it, but she was the expert, even though Colin didn’t say that, of course.

  Lady Val was the one who knew everything and so it was important to protect her. Anyway they, the police, seemed to be more interested in the baby. He’d had a soft spot for Angie. There’d been a couple of black girls went down The Jolly Sailor but Colin had only fancied Angie. When he first started buying her drinks, he hadn’t known she was a smackhead. He’d found that out when they’d had sex in the beer garden. He’d been besotted and very guilty. How could he fancy one of them? How could he have got one of them pregnant?

  She’d wanted to get rid of it and Colin had told her he could arrange that. He’d spoken to Arthur who had told him he’d like to help in some way. He hadn’t judged him. Weeks had passed then, and Angie had begun to get agitated. Then Arthur had got back to him. He’d said that there was money for junk if Angie agreed to have the baby and then let him take it off her. He hadn’t lied to Colin, he’d told him they’d done this before. Lud liked it. But Angie hadn’t been told. She’d never asked.

  Of course, it had been born small and fractious. She’d had it, as Arthur had told her she must, at home and then given it to Colin. He’d handed over five grand on the condition she keep her mouth shut. She’d told him she was going abroad. Whether she had or not, he didn’t know. All Colin Macbeth did know was that he wasn’t going to tell the Old Bill any of that.

  ‘I know you don’t want to give me the names of the two boys who alerted you to John Macbeth’s whereabouts, but you also know I have to have them,’ Manson said to Mumtaz.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want them to get into trouble.’

  Manson sighed. ‘They were selling an unlicensed pain control product.’

  ‘I know, but they were trying to help people. That cream has been in short supply.’

  ‘And yet by your own admission they were also trying to make money to procure an abortion for Lawrence’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but I suspect the boys were duped,’ she said.

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  ‘Yes, but … Oh,’ she threw her arms in the air, ‘but look what came out of that! They indirectly enabled you—’

  ‘We had been monitoring Hobbs and co for months,’ he said.

  She wanted to ask him why, in that case, he hadn’t gone in to save John himself, but she knew that was pointless. He wasn’t going to tell her anything about his operation. She was there simply to give an account of what had happened to her.

  Nevertheless she said, ‘They’re good lads, DI Manson. They could’ve just kept quiet about what they’d witnessed but they had genuine concerns for John, which were borne out.’

  ‘Pity you didn’t come to us then, Mrs Hakim,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve told you why not.’

  ‘And I’ve told you that I will have to temporarily revoke your licence.’

  He had. So far it seemed this was not also going to apply to Lee, but it was a bitter blow to Mumtaz.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘And I understand that. I would probably have done the same in your position.’

  ‘But you will also get your day in court,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t recall whether Hobbs himself actually tried to kill me or not,’ she said. ‘I have no memory of what happened when I entered that house. Someone threw me into that room and, I think, they left me for dead. I certainly wasn’t fed and no one came to check on me.’

  ‘Why did you go into Hobbs’s house? You weren’t invited.’