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can stop. We’ve done it.’ They were at the edge of the bridge, approaching the first tower, still not slowing. Marchant knew that tears were mixing with Pradeep’s sweat as he tried to struggle on, for his young son, to the middle of the bridge. But his legs were beginning to buckle, first one, then the other, and soon he was in Marchant’s arms, sobbing, as they slowed to a walking pace. Marchant glanced at his receiver to check their speed: it still said that they were running at eight minutes per mile.
    Marchant never established the exact order of what happened next. He remembered two bomb disposal officers, weighed down with protective khaki clothing, running across from the far side of the bridge, shouting at him to remain where he was. And he later learnt that at the same time, somewhere in the skies above Heathrow, two passenger planes started their final approaches sooner than they should have, setting themselves on a collision course that was only averted by an extra-vigilant air traffic controller.
    The double-tap gunshot that rang out on the bridge, jerking Pradeep’s head back, must have been fired just before the bomb disposal squad reached them. Marchant remembered holding Pradeep’s limp body for a second and then slumping down with him to the tarmac. The two dum-dum bullets had spread out inside Pradeep’s skull, rather than passing through it. The back of his head felt like moist moss.
    The belt was cut free and disarmed in the subsequent blur, but as Marchant was led away in a cacophony of sirens, all he could recall thinking about was Pradeep’s son, and whether he would now be allowed to live.

4
    Daniel Marchant looked out across the shallow valley and watched as a flock of Canada geese flew along the canal, rising from its surface to turn right towards the village. A faint mist hung above the water, streaked with blue smoke from the early-morning stoves of canal boats moored along the far bank. Beside the canal was the railway to London, and a small, three-carriage train was waiting in the station for the first commuters of the day. In the woods on the hillside beyond, a woodpecker was hammering in short bursts. Otherwise, there was stillness.
    Marchant had slept only intermittently, despite his exhaustion, and he knew that another day of questioning lay ahead. At least he was now out of London, in a safe house somewhere in Wiltshire. After the marathon, an unmarked car had taken him from Tower Bridge to Thames House, where he had showered and changed into clothes brought over from his flat by Leila. He saw her briefly, gave back the mobile phone, but their conversation was stilted. The look on her face came as a surprise. He had been keen to meet, to thank her for helping him through the race, but he was grateful for her withdrawn manner; it had put him on guard.
    It wasn’t that he had expected to be fêted as a hero, but neither had he thought he would be led down into the basement of MI5’s headquarters for hours of questioning in a small, airless room. A debrief in Legoland would have been more appropriate, given he was still on MI6’s payroll. But it was clear, from the moment he had arrived at Thames House, that another agenda was being followed. He just wasn’t sure exactly what it was.
    His role in the marathon bomb plot was problematic for the intelligence community, he accepted that. It troubled him, too: why he had been there, why no one else had been suspicious of the belt. A have-a-go hero had saved the day, except that he wasn’t an ordinary member of the public, he was a suspended MI6 officer; an officer whose late father had been suspected of treason; a son who wanted to clear the family name.
    He knew MI5 was behind the decision to suspend him, just as it had been the driving force behind his father’s removal as Chief of MI6, which had added an extra degree of tension to his interrogation in the basement.
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