The Inquiry. Will Caine
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WILL CAINE lives in South London. He is a BAFTA award-winning and highly-acclaimed investigative film-maker and journalist.
He has spent much of his life delving into the secrets of state. The Inquiry is Will Caine’s first thriller.
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Will Caine 2019
Will Caine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008325633
In memory of
my brother-in-law James
and his son Miles.
‘There were one or two big ones. That’s how we kept a lid on it for so long. But we were never fully sure about them. How could we be? They were from a different world.’
Ex-MI5 Officer, private conversation
Contents
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
2005
The ping of a phone. She jerks awake, grabs it, brings it close to her face, checks the time.
6.47 a.m.
Odd. No one messages her this early.
She lies back on her pillow, pulls up the duvet, clicks on ‘view’.
Don’t use the buses or tubes in London today.
She rubs sleep from her eyes. What the f— is this?
She scrolls down. Just a number. No name, no one in her contacts. She rechecks the number – nothing familiar about it.
She screws her eyes shut, kneads them with her knuckles, thinks. She hits reply, thumbs on keys.
Who is this?
She waits. After a few seconds, the phone pings again.
Message sending failed.
What is this? She clicks back on the message, hits ‘options’, adds the name as ‘Anon’ and the number to her contacts. She hits call. The ringtone is instantly interrupted by a woman’s voice. ‘The number you have dialled is unobtainable.’
Weird. Totally random. Has to be a mistake.
She gets up, washes, dresses, applies make-up, the everyday rhythms. The words still churn in her head. Butterflies jig in her stomach. She begins to realise she can’t get rid of the nagging thought.
What if the text is for real? And the sender’s chosen to vanish…
Stop imagining. It’s a rogue message – people get them all the time from all sorts of weirdos. She wonders how many others must have had it. Thousands probably – some madman trying to create a scare. That’s probably easy – a simple piece of code can do mass send-outs of texts.
Or just a sick joke from a sick mind.
She goes downstairs, makes her usual cup of coffee, toasts her usual slice of bread. She turns on the radio, volume low. All the chatter’s