Thorne had called on his way back from Hackney, and while they were waiting for him to arrive, Donnelly, Chivers and Pascoe gathered for a pre-contact briefing in the small room behind the school stage. Pascoe listened while Chivers continued to press for technical support, arguing that the operation was not moving forward, that the information they were getting back from the phone calls was limited. Donnelly nodded and grunted, casting the occasional glance in Pascoe’s direction. He had not been in the best of moods since they had relieved the overnight team a couple of hours before.
‘Everything OK?’ Pascoe asked.
Chivers looked at her, annoyed, as though he had almost forgotten she was there at all. Pascoe ignored it. She had been trying to do the same with him.
‘Just the usual carry-on,’ Donnelly said.
Pascoe waited.
‘My boss is getting it in the neck from the Commissioner, who’s getting it in the neck from the Mayor’s office because Transport for London are kicking off.’
‘So now your boss is giving you grief.’
‘People need to get around.’ Chivers slurped at his coffee. ‘They want their lives back.’
‘So does Helen Weeks.’
‘It’s not your problem,’ Donnelly said. He turned back to Chivers and asked him to carry on.
‘We get a Technical Support Unit in, let them do their stuff and see how it pans out,’ Chivers said. ‘I don’t see what we’ve got to lose. At least with all that in place, we’ll be in a far better situation if anything does happen and we need to go in quickly.’
‘We’re all hoping that doesn’t happen though, obviously.’
‘I said “if”.’
‘What exactly are we talking about?’ Pascoe asked.
‘Microphones in the walls. Maybe some cameras in there if we’re lucky and depending on the set-up.’ Seeing that Pascoe was about to raise her usual objections, Chivers steamed on. ‘Listen, Akhtar won’t have a clue what we’re doing, all right? No need to worry on that score. Some of the gear these guys have got is so sophisticated they could slip a microphone in your knickers and you wouldn’t know it.’
‘You reckon?’
Chivers smiled. ‘They’re like ninjas.’
Nobody spoke for a long few seconds. The only sounds were the squawk of a radio from the hall and the rustle as Chivers adjusted the weapons belt around his waist. Pascoe saw that he had now added an M26 Taser to his personal armoury.
‘OK, we’ll see how this next call goes,’ Donnelly said. ‘If there’s no significant change we’ll bring in a TSU.’
Chivers nodded, happy.
‘Is this just because they want the bloody station reopened?’ Pascoe asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Donnelly said.
Pascoe knew she had overstepped the mark and looked away. A tiny, suspicious part of her thinking: is this because I knocked you back yesterday?
Donnelly stood up. ‘Like I said, we’ll see what happens when Thorne gets here and we put the one o’clock call in. That might change things.’ He gathered his notes together. ‘From what Thorne told me on the phone, it sounds like he’s planning to rattle Akhtar’s cage a bit.’
Chivers said, ‘Good,’ and Pascoe said nothing.
She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of what Thorne was planning at all.