Donnelly had taken Thorne’s call in the playground, shivering beneath a Met Police umbrella and helping himself to some slightly stale fruit cake from Teapot One as they had talked. Now, he walked quickly back to the TSU truck to relay Thorne’s news. If they could contain the situation, keep the lid on things inside the newsagent’s for just another couple of hours, then they might well see the result they all wanted before knocking-off time.
As soon as he climbed up into the truck, he could see that he had missed something.
‘What?’ he said.
Pascoe was pale, slumped in a chair. The two TSU technicians were looking at the floor. Chivers shook his head and said, ‘Jesus.’
‘I didn’t think about it,’ Pascoe said. ‘It never even occurred to me.’
‘ What? ’ Donnelly asked again.
‘She kept saying everything was fine.’ Pascoe looked from Donnelly to Chivers. ‘Every time I asked, she told me they were all doing fine. You heard.’
The sounds of the television in Akhtar’s storeroom were still coming through the speakers. Donnelly asked the technicians to lower the volume a little, then stepped across to Sue Pascoe. ‘Exactly what didn’t you think about, Sue? What never occurred to you?’
She looked at him.
The male technician – Yates – cleared his throat. ‘Well, it was Annette who pointed it out.’ He gestured towards the female technician sitting next to him; whip-thin with spiky black hair coloured red at the tips. He tentatively laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘It was her idea, really.’
His colleague nodded and spoke quietly. ‘I was just saying that we’ve been monitoring the conversations in there for about four hours now, and yes I know that the television’s been on for a lot of the time and that nobody’s said a great deal. It’s just that in all that time we haven’t heard anything from the second hostage. From Mr Mitchell.’
‘Not a peep,’ Yates said.
Donnelly stared at the speakers for a few seconds, as though willing Stephen Mitchell’s voice to suddenly burst from them. ‘Oh, Christ.’ He turned and looked at Chivers.
‘DS Weeks assured us that everything in there was fine.’ Pascoe sounded as though she was talking to herself. ‘Repeatedly.’
‘You told us it was fine,’ Donnelly said.
‘Because I believed that it was.’
‘All that guff about her voice being normal and no signs of coercion. “There isn’t a problem,” you said. That was your professional opinion, if I remember rightly.’
‘That’s the way I remember it, too,’ Chivers said.
Pascoe looked as though the breath had been punched from her. ‘This wasn’t just me,’ she stammered. ‘Nobody else seemed too concerned about Mitchell.’ She stood up, fumbling to straighten her jacket. ‘It was not just me… ’
Donnelly reached for a headset and threw it at Pascoe.
‘Call her.’