Питер Джеймс - Dead if You Don’t

Saturday 12 August

17.00–18.00

The steward’s body language worried Roy Grace. He watched her talk to the man in the next seat along, who shrugged his shoulders. She turned to the people in the row behind, asking them questions.

Telling Bruno to stay where he was, Grace slipped out into the aisle and hurried down to her.

There was a sudden surge of energy from the crowd. A massive roar.

‘ALBION... ALBION... ALBION!’

But any thoughts of the game were far from Grace’s mind: he was in full professional mode. ‘Hi,’ he said, holding up his warrant card. ‘I’m a police officer. Are you worried about that camera?’

She joined him in the aisle. ‘I’ve been asked to check it out, sir, yes. Did you see the man who was sitting there?’

‘Yes, and I wasn’t happy about him. He was looking very nervous.’

Annette Day spoke into her radio to Morris. ‘Sir, I’m with a police officer, Detective Superintendent Grace, who was sitting a couple of rows behind and has concerns about the man who left his seat and the camera.’

Adrian Morris straight away sent out an instruction to all stewards to go to Priority Messages on their radios. It was code for a potential major incident. He updated Andy Kundert, who immediately ordered all police officers in the ground to switch their radios to TX Inhibit, which would block any transmission — a standard procedure for a suspected bomb, as many explosive devices used by terrorists could be set off by transmission from a mobile phone.

Next, Kundert updated Oscar-1 on the developing incident, giving him brief details, then asked Morris to arrange for the Expo dog handler, Anna Riis, who was at the stadium on standby, to check the camera out urgently.

The dog handler appeared with her springer spaniel, Brayley, wearing a fluorescent green harness labelled EXPLOSIVES SEARCH.

A fresh chant broke out. ‘WE ARE BRIGHTON, SUPER BRIGHTON, WE ARE BRIGHTON FROM THE SOUTH!’

Several people stood up to avoid their view being blocked by the handler, which had a ripple effect, and in seconds the whole stand was on its feet. The steward directed the handler to the suspect device. The excited dog stood, placing both paws on the edge of the seat, pointing at the camera with its nose. Then, as it had been trained, it tapped its right paw, several times.

Now for Adrian Morris the nightmare had become real.

Saturday 12 August

Earlier that day

Passengers at Tenerife Airport were buckling themselves into their seats on the BA flight bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, four hours away.

Among them were retired Brighton solicitor Martin Diplock and his wife, Jane, a former legal executive. They were both a little apprehensive, as were many of the passengers of a similar vintage to themselves who were old enough to remember that this airport, on 27 March 1977, was the scene of the deadliest accident in aviation history. In thick fog, the pilot of a KLM Boeing 747 misheard the instructions of the control tower and began taxiing, straight into the path of a Pan Am Boeing 747. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed.

But the elegant young woman seated beside them, in designer jeans and trainers, an expensive-looking leather jacket, a bling watch and sharply styled brown hair, who told them she was in transit from Albania, seemed even more anxious than themselves, trembling and perspiring, and constantly looking at her watch as if fixated by it. And each time she looked, her lips moved, as if she was doing some kind of mental arithmetic.

The unspoken thought went through both their minds, however irrational they knew it was, that she might be a terrorist, anxious about the timer on a bomb. To make conversation, Jane asked her if she was OK. The young woman assured her in limited, broken English that she was fine, this was only the second flight in her life and she was a little nervous, that was all. She was fine, thank you, really!

Jane Diplock felt better, too; she seemed a sweet little thing, not sinister at all — although how could you really tell?

The cabin crew closed the doors, but there was no sign of the engines starting. Then the pilot’s voice came through the intercom, calm and steady and very apologetic. He said there was a technical problem and they were waiting for an engineer. There was likely to be a delay of thirty minutes, maybe a little longer. Meanwhile, passengers could continue to use their electronic devices.

Martin Diplock checked the time. 12.10 p.m. It was a four-hour flight and they were due to attend his son’s birthday dinner in Brighton this evening — it would be tight as the plane wasn’t scheduled to land until 16.40.

The young woman produced a mobile phone with a gaudy cover from her new-looking handbag and started to play a game on it. After a couple of minutes, she looked at her watch yet again and began, feverishly, doing more mental arithmetic.

After almost an hour the pilot came back on the intercom. He was very sorry he told them, the engineer was delayed. He would give them a further update shortly.

The woman looked increasingly anxious. She was perspiring more heavily now.

‘Are you OK?’ Jane Diplock asked her.

She nodded, her complexion pale, then began counting again on her manicured fingers, her lips moving as she did so.

Saturday 12 August

17.00–18.00

There wasn’t much anyone could teach Stephen Suckling about mechanical diggers, grabbers and Jaw Crushers. He was fifty-two, and he’d held an operator’s licence since he was twenty-seven. After ten years of back-breaking manual labour on building sites — much of it in shite weather — he figured out there had to be an easier way for someone with few academic qualifications to make a living.

Such as the guys on the sites driving the bulldozers and cranes, for a start. They were inside their cabs, cosy and dry, and, he subsequently discovered, took home a far fatter pay packet than most of the manual labourers. So he’d got himself some qualifications by attending night school.

Since then he’d driven pretty much every make and model of construction site vehicle that was out there. Then he spotted a job advert that really appealed — and was the successful applicant. For the past eight years he’d been contentedly employed at the four-acre Shoreham Harbour depot of the Recycled Aggregates Supplies division of Carter Contracting, driving a yellow caterpillar-track excavator and operating the fifty-ton Premiertrak R 400 Powerscreen Jaw Crusher. That monster machine reduced the piles of rubble brought in daily by the company’s endless chain of lorries into different grades. Some would provide footings for the construction industry, some for highways or footpaths, car parks or drains.

There wasn’t much, after this length of time, that anyone could tell him about crushing concrete, nor demolition rubble, nor asphalt — although asphalt was his least favourite stuff because on hot days, like today, it stuck in the grabber’s jaws, and had to be laboriously scraped away by hand. His hands, as he was the sole operator on this site.

That was one of the things he liked most about this job. His bosses, working out of a Portakabin at one end of the site, pretty much left him to it, and so long as he kept up with the constant deliveries, working away at the different piles, his hours were his own, and there was no asshole of a site foreman to shout at him.

The county was currently going through a building boom, which meant demand for aggregates was at a premium. For Stephen Suckling, this meant lots of overtime and nice, fat wage packet every Thursday.