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vibrate. She didn’t like Spelling, his punchy name-dropping manner or the managerial style that someone had described as exultant decisiveness. Around the building it was said that his intelligence was sharp rather than deep and that he had none of the incorruptibility, shrewdness or ease of the outgoing Chief, Sir Robin Teckman. Spelling had won the appointment as a moderniser. There was much talk of horizontal management structures and the flow of ideas between different levels, but the evidence pointed to the opposite leaning. He was a hierarchical bureaucrat pretending to be a general.

    ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘The shooting, I mean.’

    ‘Well, I’ve been pretty busy today. I haven’t had time to catch up with the people I was working with yesterday.’

    ‘Yes, yes, but you have a view. You must wonder.’

    ‘Yes, I wonder why Admiral Norquist was on a scheduled flight and there was no security prepared and ready to meet him. It all seems a bit slapdash.’

    ‘And further down the time line…?’

    Time line was a typical Spelling phrase. ‘You mean later on - when the shooting occurred?’ She put it as neutrally as possible. ‘It looks pretty confused.’ ‘Yes, it was certainly that.’

    She remained silent. It was still his call.

    ‘And you don’t have any theories about where that bullet came from?’

    ‘Nothing apart from what I’ve read. I imagine they’ll know if they retrieved it from his body.’

    ‘Oh, I don’t think that will happen.’

    ‘So there was an exit wound. I didn’t notice that mentioned in the papers. They said it was lodged in his spine.’

    ‘They tend not to publish too much of that sort of thing - it’s distressing for the family.’

    ‘I see,’ she said, understanding that there would be no official revision of the story. Norquist had been ‘assassinated’ in an operation involving a pair of young men, traced by the registration of one of the vans to the Pakistani communities in the Midlands, and the truck driver, who was also believed to be of Asian origin. With the two men dead and the driver still missing after an escape through the undergrowth along the railway embankment, the British media happily accepted the theory of a carefully coordinated plan. The enthusiasm for this account had not been dampened by the fact that no detonator had been found attached to the drums of petrol on the lorry.

    His eyes scanned her desk. He reached forward and turned one of the Terminal Three schedules towards him. ‘Now, tell me what you’re doing here, Isis.’

    ‘I’m trying to see what Rahe’s likely destination was yesterday. ’

    ‘Any ID on the man who took his place?’

    ‘Not yet.’

    ‘Could you write a side of theory backed up by a few facts? The Chief’s very interested in what happened out at Heathrow.’

    She hesitated.‘You want a report on this? It’s all very preliminary…’

    ‘By tomorrow then. If you need help, Sarre and Dolph are around. Tell them this is for me and the Chief.’ He made for the door, but before he reached it, stopped. ‘And in your report, leave out all mention of the shooting. Just focus on the contemporaneous events at Heathrow. That’s what interests us.’

    Herrick went back to the airline schedules. Out of seventy-two flights to land between 5.55 a.m. and 1.45 p.m., fifty-one had come from the United States or Canada, which she excluded for the moment because of the heightened airport security and emigration watches in North America. The remaining twenty-one flights came from places such as Abu Dhabi, Dhaka, Johannesburg, Beirut and Tehran, cities where controls were far less stringent. She guessed that most of the aircraft were wide-bodied jets, carrying an average of two hundred passengers, which meant that around four thousand people had landed at Heathrow that morning. It would be an enormous task to search all the flights for a man matching the picture, and to establish what had