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something suspicious, and in this instance, ringing the terrorist hotline wasn’t really an option.’
    â€˜Why not?’ Wylie barked, walking around in front of Marchant. His voice had an odd habit of cracking and rising in pitch when he was angry. The effect should have been funny, but it was unsettling.
    â€˜Why not?’ Marchant echoed, louder now that he could see Wylie again. ‘Because I didn’t have a bloody phone with me.’
    Marchant struggled to control his urge to shout. There was no reason to bring Leila into this. She would tell them about her TETRA phone in a separate debrief. He spoke slowly and clearly, emphasising the words as if speaking to a child. ‘I chose to stay with Pradeep. I’m not sure it would have been that easy to identify him again. There were 35,000 runners out there.’
    â€˜Including some of our officers,’ Wylie said.
    Flat-footing it along at the back with the fifteen-minute milers, Marchant thought.
    â€˜This attack didn’t come as a complete surprise,’ Wylie added.
    â€˜I’m sure it didn’t.’ And if Marchant was writing the incident up, his report would have made that abundantly clear: MI5 saw it coming, and still screwed up.
    â€˜You knew about it in advance, then?’ Wylie asked, his voice cracking again. This time he pulled out an asthma inhaler and sucked once on it, hard.
    â€˜I didn’t say that.’
    â€˜But your former colleagues knew. They just don’t like sharing information much, do they?’
    Then Marchant thought he understood. Wylie was suggesting that his involvement was pre-planned: part of a conspiracy by MI6 to expose MI5’s failings, to get his job back.
    â€˜I can’t answer for MI6,’ he said.
    â€˜No, you’re right, you can’t. But you’d like to. Working for Six kept you sober. We’re seeing the real Marchant now, though, aren’t we? Oh, come on, you were tipped off. One of your old “mates”’ – he exaggerated the word derisively – ‘chose to tell you rather than us. You went out there this morning looking for a man with a belt. You didn’t just stumble across him, the one runner out of 35,000 who wanted to blow himself up.’
    Marchant thought of Leila, what she’d said about Paul Myers picking up some chatter just before the marathon, and felt his palms moisten. Had someone logged the call from Myers to her? His chance encounter could begin to look anything but: Cheltenham tells MI6; MI6 informs suspended officer, who thwarts bomb attack under MI5’s nose. Wylie, though, had no idea of the fear he was sowing in Marchant’s mind.
    â€˜So what did this rag-head tell you about himself?’ Wylie asked, changing tack again.
    Rag-head ? Marchant marvelled at how unreconstructed MI5 still was. He thought it had become more ethnically diverse. ‘He said his name was Pradeep. He was originally from Cochin in Kerala. He called it Kochi, the local name, suggesting he was Indian.’ Marchant had always liked data. Hard facts, unquestionable stats – they were reassuring in his shifting world.
    â€˜South India,’ Wylie said. ‘We all hoped that little terror campaign had gone away.’
    Don’t bring my father into this, Marchant thought. Last year’s bombings, believed to have been run from South India, had stopped when his father stood down as Chief at Christmas, a point not lost on his enemies in MI5. ‘Pradeep also had a good knowledge of New Delhi,’ Marchant said, determined to remain calm. ‘He was living there with his wife and son. He seemed to know Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave in the south of the city.’
    â€˜An unusual part of town to know, where all the foreign embassies are.’
    â€˜Possibly. It’s hard to tell. He revealed very little information about himself: spoke good English, with a heavy Indian accent. His child was four,