Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner herself was at St Giles and St Nic’s.
The church hushed when she tapped her microphone.
A camera light fired up directly in front of her and she winced.
Six officers sat either side of her. ‘It is six p.m. on Tuesday. The attack …’ She paused.
‘The incident in Sidmouth happened at two p.m. last Friday the sixteenth of May. A lot has happened in four days.’
Facing forwards, Edward saw a flickering television screen with Jordan Callintree on it.
The Devon policeman sat upright and attentive, as if he was part of the powerful panel the Met had deployed, but the TV monitor was small, the connection was patchy, and the set was propped against the front leg of the trestle table.
Most members of the audience would not even be able to see it.
The commissioner was the oldest person at the table, pushing sixty.
Her face had the rough-hewn look of a woman who had fought her way to the top in a man’s world.
She was unsmiling, motionless, her face set like cement, hair concrete blonde.
A hat held everything in place. The only part of her that moved as she spoke was her lips.
‘My force have played out of their socks,’ she said.
‘When we were eventually alerted …’ The pause was silent condemnation of Devon’s farting around.
‘When we heard, we came running. We deployed for a terrorist attack on our homeland.’ Edward raised his eyebrows at the Americanism. ‘We were right to.’
A pause. Still the woman moved nothing, not even blinking, staring straight ahead. There were more than two hundred people in the church, and you could hear a pin drop.
‘I commend the investigations of our colleagues here in Devon and their … professionalism. They traced the bike licence to an address, giving us a name and a connection to Ukraine and possibly to Russia. We had a little more about the biker, but not much. After the work of a local scientist’ – ‘work’ sounding like another word for vandalism – ‘we had just the single intact ampoule left from the incident, and we then had the tragic death of Nina Lopez. May I ask that we now stand for a minute’s silence in memory of Nina? ’
Edward stood in the pew, more slowly than the people around him because he was holding the phone, a notepad and a pen. For a minute he thought of his only child, his beloved Matty, who had died at eleven.
When they sat back down, the commissioner of the Met continued, ‘We now have a readout from the last remaining ampoule. If I may, I now bring in Dr Timothy Gregson, who is with the science and forensics branch of the Met and who has been liaising with our friends at Porton Down.’
Edward looked at the other twelve members of the panel for a clue as to who would be the scientist. But then the bald, bespectacled man in the space directly beside him got to his feet. ‘Hello everyone.’
He turned awkwardly in the narrow pew to face the congregation.
All being well, RTR-92 would now be patching through the line they had run from the sound desk at the back of the church.
The man’s left hand was still moving – the wrist rocking anti-clockwise and back again.
He held the disorderly sheaf of A4 documents in his right hand, pinning them to his body with his right forearm, which was trembling slightly.
For balance he placed a knee on the wooden pew.
‘To the science,’ he began. ‘I am a specialist in poisons, chemical devices, and, more broadly, forensics. Myself and my team have spent thirty-six hours analysing what was a tiny sample. I can confirm it was substantially radioactive. An isotope called Actinium-224.’
Dr Gregson paused as a gasp echoed around the church, reaching into his jacket and withdrawing a banana.
‘This is a banana.’ He waved it. ‘I appreciate people at the back can’t see it.
But it certainly is. I use this in schools.
A banana emits radiation – no need to worry!
Every banana does. It is pulsing fifteen becquerels, a measure of radiation, virtually nothing.
But nuclear substances vary in power. When Putin poisoned one of his enemies in London, Mr Litvinenko, he used polonium-210 which contained two billion becquerels of radiation.
This is why we had to identify the substance used at Toppings as a priority.
‘Regarding our measurement – there is alpha and beta radiation, but’ – he read the shifting bums in the crowd – ‘I won’t get into that. There are other units. Grays and sieverts, for example, measure human exposure. Grays measure the actual radiation taken in by a body.
‘I’m afraid, with the child Nina, she was exposed to a colossal number of grays because of ingestion. She swallowed two capsules. And children have a smaller cellular structure. I will return to that poor girl in a moment.
‘Let me show you how this formula works in the Toppings case. Screen please.’
He gestured to a projector screen hanging directly above Edward, at the opposite end of the nave to the pulpit, that he had barely noticed until now.
It was presumably extended and retracted to display hymn lyrics and the like.
Gregson turned in his pew and began to read the formula directly above him.
Actinium 224
7 × 10-10 sieverts per becquerel
Lethal dose 10 sieverts
Amount required
10 ÷ 7 × 10-10 becquerels
= 14bn becquerels
= 77 nanograms
It might as well have been a foreign language.
Edward winced as noise began to slowly build in the church.
The audience were surrendering angrily to the detail, becoming impatient, needing to know what this all meant.
A whispering had started, which spread from pew to pew, almost a hiss, like steam blowing through the spout of an old stove kettle in the moment before the whistle blew.
Someone shouted, ‘Get to the point! What is a nanogram when it’s at home? Speed up, man!’
‘Are we all infected?’ someone else shouted.
The scientist seemed thrown by the reaction, as if he was expecting a more positive crowd. But the hundreds of Sidmouthians in the audience just wanted the conclusion. How much of this substance was a fatal dose? Who else would die?
‘One gram is about what a paperclip weighs. Imagine a paperclip cut into a million pieces. Each weighs one nanogram. A lethal dose of Ac-224 would be one third the size of one of the pieces. We recovered a sample the size of a pea. That alone could kill, realistically, a million people. But—’
It was too late: the audience descended into chaos.
Eventually someone blew a whistle. An old-fashioned police whistle! It was not an officer – it was the old man who looked after Sidmouth Museum most weekdays; he must have locked up and come next door to watch the show. He blew and blew and blew on the whistle until the room was calm.
The commissioner pushed her mouth into the microphone and the volume when she spoke quelled the tumult. ‘Wait, everyone. This is not supposed to be a bad news speech. Doctor, please get to the point.’
The scientist continued. ‘I know I scared you by saying the sample had enough radiation to kill everyone in Exeter, but most of the radiation from Ac-224 is extremely short-range. Yes, it would kill someone who swallowed it, but not someone who touched it for less than, say, an hour or two. The motorbike rider with his lead panier would be safe, the pizza parlour customers are not irradiated, not one of you is irradiated, but poor Nina, who ate two of the capsules, is dead.’
There was a long silence as Gregson finished speaking, then a flurry of conversation, though with the heat taken out of it now.
At that moment Edward saw that a television monitor showing the face of Jordan Callintree, which had been propped unobtrusively against a leg of the trestle table, had now fallen onto its back.
One of the vergers had noticed and pulled it upright again.
Callintree was evidently speaking, not realizing he had been on mute for the last thirty minutes.
‘Stay where you are, everyone. That’s not the end of it. Doctor, please give us the – I could almost call it “the punchline.” Go on, quickly please.’
‘If this was a terrorist attack, it was pretty hopeless – like a terrorist trying to blow up a tower block with an indoor firework. It was certainly not delivered in the way any true terrorist would have planned,’ he concluded.
‘For that reason, I see no cause for the people isolating to hide themselves away any longer. My judgement is that not one of them will be irradiated.’