The Inquiry

I would therefore be most grateful if, in the first instance, you would meet me privately. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that it is vital for my sake, if not yours, that this meeting is confidential and unobserved. I leave it to you to arrange a time and place that would suit these criteria. I can travel anonymously by bicycle. Anywhere within reach of Vauxhall Cross would be suitable. The meeting would be purely exploratory and you would be making no commitment by agreeing to it. However, I do not exaggerate when I say that truly vital matters of state and possible wrong-doing are at stake.

I would ask you to deliver your reply hand-written to the address above. I hope very much to hear from you with your arrangement.

Yours most sincerely

Francis Morahan

Sara stood up with a jerk, blood rushing from her head. Both the author’s identity and the fretfulness of the letter were a shock. She took a few deep breaths. Her thumping heart began to slow and the colour returned to her face. She wondered at how such perfect, concise sentences could emerge from such an apparently shaky hand. She didn’t dare to step out of the cubicle until she’d calmed down. It was the most disconcerting letter she had ever received, prompting a scattergun of questions and images. Chambers was not the place to confront them.

She walked back to her room; for once she was relieved to find Sheila gone. She stuffed the next day’s briefs and a sheaf of articles on cybercrime into her bag, grabbed her coat and headed for the exit. Ludo’s door was open – deliberately, she suspected.

‘Go on then,’ he grinned. ‘Something interesting?’

‘Really, Ludo, is not a lady’s privacy to be protected?’

He wasn’t buying it. ‘If it’s an offer, tell them to sod off. It’s my firm intention, Sara Shah, to clamp you in chains to 14 Knightly Court until my retiring day.’

She wandered over, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and headed out into the street, making for the Embankment. The sun was dipping beyond Big Ben and the skyscrapers of the new Vauxhall megacity. She crossed Waterloo Bridge, losing herself among the swathes of homeward-bound commuters. She found herself staring at the London Eye. The memory of that day – when it was still the new, exciting addition to the capital’s skyline called the Millennium Wheel – struck her like a smack of iced water.

She must snap out of it. London, her logical mind told her, remained safe. For well over a decade after 7/7 only one death, that of Lee Rigby, the soldier drummer hacked to death outside Woolwich barracks, had been the result of terrorism. Not just in the city but in Britain itself. Then came the van and knife attacks in central London; the bombing of a pop concert at Manchester Arena, lethally shattering the calm; the reminder that terror had not, and would not, go away.

Compared with other death tolls – road accidents, fires, polluted air – the figures remained, it seemed to Sara, insignificant. The ultimate victims were ordinary Muslims, tainted by association, fearful of hate-fuelled revenge. Yet, unable to shift the strangeness of Morahan’s scrawled letter from her mind, she found herself edgily inspecting the young Asian with the blue rucksack fidgeting in the corner of the underground carriage. When he stepped out of the train at Kennington, she was, despite herself, unable to prevent a flush of relief.

Back on Tooting Broadway, her mood changed. The Islamic Centre and halal butchers stood contentedly alongside trendy brunch cafés with eager central European waitresses and antipodean chefs. In this part of London few wore the full niqab and burka, but there were plenty of hijabis like herself. Some young Muslim women dressed in figure-hugging jeans and short-sleeved shirts; that was not her own choice now, but she never forgot the time when, all too briefly, she had also enjoyed that lifestyle.

She headed up the Broadway and into Webster Road with its terraces of small 1920s bow-fronted houses. A few sagged unloved, rotting window sills and yellowing streaks from overflowing pipes discolouring their whitewashed frontages. But most were spruced-up and clean, often with recently added porches and front doors proudly displaying their panelled multi-coloured glass. Her shrewd father had bought their house three years after she was born, during the heyday of Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy, a nest for the family he’d once hoped to grow.

She had been just eight years old when her mother had died – how distant it seemed. Not old enough truly to know her; or to ask her what she really believed. Would her mother, with the conviction of a convert’s faith, have seeded in her the certainty her father lacked? Whenever Sara occasionally referred to her, her father never seemed to want to engage; the answer was always a platitude. ‘Yes, your mother was always a good woman.’ ‘Always true to God.’ ‘So beautiful.’ ‘I never stopped loving her.’ It was territory he did not want to enter. After her death, the house had become father and daughter’s sanctuary. She never thought of leaving him, whatever the pressures to marry from aunts and cousins. With him to look after, how could she? The truth was that, far from being her burden, he was her excuse.

She turned her key in the front door Yale lock and it opened. Noisily – a signal to her father that she was home – she wiped her feet, hung up her coat and after a few seconds called, ‘Dad!’ No answer; he must have forgotten to double lock on his way out. Despite such lapses, his brain was in good order and she remembered it was his bridge evening at the Working Men’s Club up in Clapham. She smiled at the thought of him – his shortness, the little sticking-out tummy and the ever-present smile. A purist might have told him that card-play was un-Islamic; he would have joyously replied that it was a great Pakistani game, and Zia Mahmood the finest player the world had ever seen.

She went into the cramped kitchen, made herself tea and headed upstairs. After her mother’s death, he had knocked through the two rooms at the back to give her a bedroom-cum-study with her own shower room. She later realised it was his way of saying he never would, nor could, remarry. No more wives, no more children. Just him and her.

She removed her scarf, jacket and tailored black skirt she wore for work, replacing them with a loose blouse, cardigan and trousers. In the shower room she stared at herself in the mirror; the unblemished pale olive skin she was blessed with stared back. The odd line was forming on her forehead but the rest of her body from high cheekbones to slender ankles, was uncreased and lean – as photographs showed, the figure of her mother not her father. She rubbed her face with soap and warm water, patted it dry and returned to the bedroom. With half a sigh, she unstrapped her black holdall and lifted out the laptop and envelope containing Morahan’s letter. From her desk she looked out at the row of neighbouring back gardens – neat flowerbeds and patches of lawn interrupted occasionally by messes of dumped detritus. She booted up her laptop and typed in the two words ‘Morahan Inquiry’.

She clicked on the official website, then ‘Chair and Panel’, and found herself lingering over the portrait photograph of Morahan himself. She tried to remember him from that Cambridge conference. He’d certainly been on the panel at one session but she couldn’t recall an actual meeting, seeing him close up, shaking his hand. It must have happened if he said so – and there’d been hundreds there.

Under the scrutiny of the camera, she detected an apprehension in the eyes, a trace of disappointment too perhaps. A figure that must be imposing peering down from the judicial bench under cover of the judge’s wig seemed unsettled. Was he an unhappy – or disenchanted – man? His biography showed the bare bones of a personal life; married Iona Chesterfield 1977, two daughters. Otherwise it outlined a seamlessly upward legal career interrupted only by a five-year stint, 1997–2002, in Parliament, ending with his resignation both as Attorney General and MP.

Or was it a lack of fulfilment those eyes betrayed? His resignation seemed never to have been fully explained. Journalists and, later, historians writing about the Iraq war, assumed Morahan had seen it coming and got out ahead. She wondered if he himself had encouraged that narrative – whether those eyes hid another story.

Press coverage of the Inquiry was patchy. On the day of its announcement by the Prime Minister the Guardian had hailed it as a ‘brave innovation to shine a chink of public light onto the security services’. The Times applauded the PM’s initiative but warned that ‘secret services must be allowed to keep secrets’.

She heard the front door lock click and footsteps below. She flinched. ‘Is that you, Dad?’ she shouted down.

‘’Course it’s me, who else are you expecting?’

Who else indeed? She collected herself, went downstairs and bound him in a close hug, tucking her chin against his ear from her greater height. They broke away and he gave her a puzzled smile.

‘Sara, you hug me tight. Are you OK?’

‘’Course I’m OK, just pleased to see you.’

He felt her relax. ‘You looked agitated to me. That’s not like my girl.’

‘Pressure, I guess.’

‘You gotta take it easy. Like me!’

‘If only,’ she laughed.

‘Anyway, I got something to celebrate. I landed a better squeeze tonight even than that one you just gave me.’

She shook her head in mock disapproval of him and handed him the sheet of paper she’d been holding. ‘You remember a while ago the government set up an Inquiry into the security services under a judge called Sir Francis Morahan?’

‘Rings some kind of bell.’ Tariq Shah was a news junkie, addicted to Channel 4 News and Newsnight. Sara was grateful for the short cuts it offered whenever she wanted to discuss something.

‘Read.’

Her father read the letter once quickly, a second time slowly. ‘I see why you’re jumpy.’

‘What should I do?’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘For once I’d like you to tell me.’

‘You know I’d never stand in your way.’

‘But would you approve?’

She could feel him trying to read her. ‘You don’t need that, Sara.’ She looked silently down at the floor. ‘See the man. Maybe he’s in trouble, needs help. Maybe it’d be good for you. For your career.’ He handed back the letter.

She raised her eyes. ‘You’ll promise never, ever even to hint about it to anyone. Anyone at all.’

‘Why would I do that? Don’t you trust me?’

‘Sorry, Dad, ’course I trust you.’ She felt a burn of shame. ‘It’s just that…’

‘I know. It’s… what’s the word? It’s peculiar.’ He inspected her with an unfamiliar curiosity. ‘You’re afraid of something, aren’t you?’ he said.

It was the enduring sadness within the love she felt for her father – far greater than for any other human being – that made her, even eighteen years later, unable to answer him.

2

Two days later at 12.55 p.m., Sara Shah arrived at the Afghan restaurant on Farnwood Road, between Tooting High Street and the Common. She’d quickly replied to the letter after discussing it with her father; he’d driven to Chelsea Place Upper that night to put it through No. 45’s front door. She’d ended the note by reminding Morahan, if he cycled, to wear a helmet; after her father set off, she wondered what on earth had possessed her to do so.

She’d proposed to Morahan a lunchtime meeting – somehow evening felt inappropriate. She was not in court that day and Ludo, as always, had happily agreed to her studying the next case files from home.

In one corner of the small restaurant, a young Asian family with two toddlers were faces down in a huge plate of sizzling mixed grill and chips. The mother and father showed traces of middle-aged bulge; she imagined the sweet slim little figures with their smooth cheeks and searching eyes going the same way. A jeans-clad boy and high-cheeked girl in a flowing red linen dress and cardigan, laced with a string of glass beads, were ordering; they must have sat down just before her. Pashtuns, she assumed. In the corner a Pakistani man sat alone munching, reading the Mirror.

Morahan had not replied to her letter; she understood that he must be nervous about communications. Her instincts told her that he would show up, even if it meant cancelling the Palace. They were correct; one minute after the designated time of 1 p.m., a tall figure strode past the window, turned through the door, and cast a wary eye over the restaurant. She rose, saying simply, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello,’ he replied. He seemed unsure whether to offer a hand to shake, finally keeping it to himself. Culturally conflicted, she noted. He sat down across the Formica table and buried himself in the menu. He cast a further eye around and behind; none of the other diners caught it.

She hesitated, wondering whether to test his humour. ‘It’s hardly the Garrick or the Temple.’

‘No.’ Expressionless, he peered back down; she couldn’t help noticing the thin prominence of the aquiline nose, with its near-perfect shallow curve. His skin was surprisingly smooth and unblemished for a man of his age; there was no sign of stray hairs emerging from nostrils or ears. His uniformly grey hair flopped elegantly over his collar edge. A good-looking man who had looked after himself. ‘What will you eat?’ he murmured.

‘Just a salad, I think.’

‘Yes, good.’ He shot another glance at their fellow customers and out of the window. ‘And then perhaps a walk. It seems too good a day to waste.’

As they made small talk, she tried to remember him as Attorney General but she had then been only in her early teens – try as she might, she couldn’t place his face among the Cabinet of that time. He had a presence, but not that of a showman; she couldn’t imagine him shouting and waving paper about in the Commons.

He rushed through his salad, a man on edge, itching for open spaces.

‘Let me get the bill,’ said Sara.

‘No, please…’

‘I insist. You have come to me. It’s the least I can do.’

They stepped outside. ‘I have my bicycle,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be here when you return. We’re not the badlands.’

A few yards down the pavement, he spun abruptly. She followed his eye; the Pakistani man from the restaurant was scurrying into the street. As they turned, he halted and made to study the menu in the window.

He bent towards her ear, his voice a hiss of panic. ‘It’s not my imagination,’ he said softly. ‘That man is watching us.’

She grinned. ‘That man is my father.’

He frowned, then smiled. ‘Oh dear. I feel a fool.’ For the first time, she felt him relax.

‘It’s all right, he’s just a little over-protective.’

‘I hope my presence is not too alarming.’

‘I’ll give him a wave to go home.’ She looked back at her father, shooing him away. ‘He’d make a terrible spy, wouldn’t he?’

‘I think perhaps if he wanted to achieve success in that profession, it might only be via the double-bluff.’

She looked at him; there was a twinkle in his eye. She tested him further. ‘Shall we walk to the Common and find a park bench? Isn’t that what spies do?’

They sat down, not at a park bench but an outdoor café. Morahan twisted around and, apparently satisfied they were out of ear-shot, leaned towards her.

‘Before you begin,’ said Sara, ‘I must ask you a question. This is a public Inquiry. You said in your letter that normally it would be for the Government Legal Department to hire counsel, after discussing it with the Chair of course.’ She lowered her eyes at him. ‘Why the secrecy? Why you alone?’ She paused. ‘And why me?’

‘If you allow me to tell you my story, Ms Shah, you will begin to understand.’

2018 – nine months earlier

Hooded brown eyes beneath heavy brown brows, familiar to him from television, bore in. ‘I’m going to do this,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘I’m going to find out what went wrong.’

Francis Morahan had been mystified by both the summons and the secretiveness of the private secretary’s phone call. ‘All I can say, Sir Francis, is that it is to discuss a project close to the PM’s heart, and one which he considers of great importance in advancing the government’s agenda.’ He could hardly refuse the summons but it was more than a decade since he had crossed the threshold of 10 Downing Street – an address he would happily have never returned to.

At 4 p.m. precisely the policeman stationed outside No. 10 opened the black door and Morahan was faced by a young man with floppy fair hair who seemed just out of school.

‘Good afternoon, Sir Francis, I’m Andrew Lamb, assistant private secretary.’ The schoolboy stretched out a hand. ‘The PM is in the study if you’d like to follow me. Though of course you must know…’

‘No, it’s been many years.’

Robin Sandford, in charcoal grey suit trousers and a white shirt symmetrically divided by a crimson tie, rose from a stiff-backed armchair along with two other men. The sight of one sank Morahan’s heart. ‘Sir Francis, I don’t think you and I have actually met…’ the Prime Minister began.

‘I think not, Prime Minister,’ said Morahan, accepting the handshake.

Sandford turned to the fleshy figure to his right. ‘But… er…’

The figure, grinning, stretched out bulbous fingers. ‘Hello, Francis, long time.’

Morahan forced a smile. ‘Hello, Geoff.’ Feeling the same old revulsion, Morahan took in the drooping jowls, multiple chins, the roll of girth pushing into trousers held by braces, gold cuff-links glinting from a striped pink and white shirt and a purple tie. Steely hair in puffed-up waves and broad spectacles failed to mask the piggy eyes and calculating mind of Geoffrey Atkinson, Home Secretary – the enduring survivor from that distant era when the party had last been in government.

Sandford turned to the second man. ‘I imagine you two have crossed paths?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t quite put it like that,’ said Sir Kevin Long, the Cabinet Secretary and most powerful civil servant in the land, upbeat in voice, rotund in shape, razor-edged in mind.

‘Good,’ said Sandford, waving them to seats. ‘Francis – if I may…’

‘Of course,’ agreed Morahan lightly, distrusting the mutual courtesies.

‘Some context first,’ continued Sandford. ‘On winning the election, I said this government would be different. We would be open and unafraid to confront ourselves as a nation, both the good and the bad. In my view – forget Europe, forget Russia, forget the economy – there’s one bad that continues a year on to outstrip all others. And, in my time, will go on doing so. Extreme fanatical Islamism.’

For the second time, Morahan felt a sinking of the heart, a sense that he was being suborned into a morass of political game-playing.

‘And yet,’ said Sandford, ‘for nearly twelve years, between 7/7 in July 2005 to Westminster Bridge in March 2017 and all that has followed since, we kept the lid on Islamist terror. I want to know what went right for so long. And what then went wrong.’ He paused, locking eyes with Morahan. ‘And may still be wrong.’ He withdrew his gaze, eyes shifting to address a window. ‘Secondly – and related to this – I want an independent examination of our security policy with regard to the hundreds of young Britons who went abroad to fight for Islamist terror and have now returned – many of whom seem to have disappeared or gone off our radar.’

‘Are these not matters purely for the police and intelligence services?’ said Morahan, calculating how to remain at one remove.

‘You may think so, Francis,’ replied Sandford. ‘And, in different ways, over the year since we were elected, I’ve tried to ask them. I am not satisfied with their answers. There is no pattern, they say. We can’t watch every sort of “lone wolf”. At times, I have even sensed evasion. As if there’s something they don’t want to talk about. It’s not enough. Therefore, I intend that the Home Secretary,’ he nodded to Atkinson, ‘should establish a public inquiry, deploying a range of expertise, to answer these questions.’ He was edging ever closer to Morahan. ‘I – and he – would like you to chair it.’

‘Aren’t you reaching for the unknowable?’ asked Morahan softly. ‘Indeed the impossible.’

Sandford grimaced. ‘Nothing is ever unknowable. And in politics nothing should be impossible or undoable.’

‘Have you consulted the chiefs?’

‘You may recall – it was leaked to a newspaper – that the previous government attempted to have a judge inquire into the security services but they lobbied successfully against it. So no, I have not consulted the chiefs. And in anticipation of your next question, neither has this time attempted to stand in the way.’

‘I think you’ll find, Francis,’ interjected Atkinson, ‘that the Security Service – Dame Isobel in particular – understands this Prime Minister has a stiffer backbone than his predecessor.’

‘And Six?’ asked Morahan, repressing a rush of revulsion.

‘Sir Malcolm,’ replied Sandford, ‘assures me of the Secret Intelligence Service’s full co-operation. He is always keen to point out that SIS’s involvement is restricted to its activities with regard to these people while they were, or are, out of the country.’

‘You mean Five and Six are still…’ Morahan hesitated, ‘defecating on each other?’

‘Not at all,’ said Sir Kevin Long. ‘Communications, I am delighted to report, are better than ever.’ It was the Cabinet Secretary’s first contribution; his beam spread broader than ever as he made it. ‘The Cs meet once a week in my presence to iron out any turf issues. All most amicable.’

Morahan imagined the politely expressed arguments and precedents the Cabinet Secretary must have used to dissuade his headlong Prime Minister from unnecessarily opening potential cans of worms – and the gracefulness with which the civil servant would have accepted his defeat. Surrounded by these powerful figures and, despite himself, moved by Sandford’s plea, he sensed the noose tightening.

‘I can understand why you’ve come to me. I’m a senior judge. We sometimes have our uses, even for politicians. And, however briefly, I was once an MP and Cabinet member, so have an element of political understanding.’

‘Precisely,’ said Sandford. ‘You are uniquely well-qualified.’

‘There is the issue of my resignation.’

‘I see no issue,’ said Long.

‘Nor me,’ added Atkinson.

‘Really, Geoff?’ Morahan sighed.

‘As I recall,’ said Atkinson, ‘Frank Morahan, as you were then generally known, resigned as Attorney General in the summer of 2002 to resume a highly successful career at the Bar and spend more time with his family.’

‘Yes, that’s what I said,’ agreed Morahan. ‘You may recall the timing. Six weeks after President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in Crawford, Texas to go to war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. Come what may. As the government’s senior law officer, I would be the one who would have to approve its legality. My view was that any such war would be illegal.’

‘That’s not what you said at the time,’ said Atkinson. ‘Not even in Cabinet.’

‘It was less than a year after 9/11. I had no wish to be disruptive. I also believed the then Prime Minister to be an honourable man.’

‘As we all did,’ said Atkinson. ‘As we all did.’

‘I’ve never sought to justify myself publicly,’ continued Morahan, ignoring the lie, ‘but, as has been speculated, this was the real reason for my resignation. I also view that war as a prime cause of the very tragedy unfolding in our country which you are now asking me to investigate. I am therefore parti-pris.’ Morahan stopped abruptly, stared down at his crossed hands. No one spoke. He raised his head in anguish at the three men around him.

‘Hey,’ said Sandford with youthful vigour, ‘slow down. We’re sixteen years on. That’s hardly a partisan view, we all recognise it. All it means is that you got there first. We as a nation reaped the whirlwind you saw gathering.’