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said Bradshaw. ‘It shows disrespect to us all.’
    No one spoke until Kafele al-Sayed had walked over and sat down on the bench. Like Bradshaw, he wasn’t of Pakistani descent. His father was an Egyptian engineer, his mother a Scottish primary-school teacher. He had inherited his mother’s pale skin and curly brown hair, his father’s hooked nose and dark eyes.
    ‘I said ten o’clock,’ said Bradshaw.
    ‘The Tube was delayed,’ said al-Sayed. ‘Someone threw themselves under a train at Queen’s Park. We had to wait until the line was clear.’ He scratched a patch of red-raw skin on his neck, just above his collar.
    Bradshaw’s jaw clenched. Al-Sayed always had an excuse for his tardiness. It was a character flaw. It showed a lack of commitment, it showed a lack of planning, but above all it showed a lack of respect. Bradshaw’s three years in the army had taught him the value of self-discipline, but he knew there was nothing to be gained from criticising al-Sayed in front of the others, so he bit his tongue. The rash on the man’s neck was a sign of his nerves, and Bradshaw had no wish to stress the man even more than he already was.
    Talwar rubbed his hands together and grinned. ‘What next?’ he asked.
    ‘We wait,’ said Bradshaw. ‘We wait and we plan.’
    ‘We showed them what we can do,’ said the man on Bradshaw’s right. Jamal Kundi was the smallest of the group, though at thirty-three he was the oldest. He worked as a car mechanic. ‘We have to keep the momentum going,’ he said, and lit a cigarette.
    ‘We killed two people,’ said Bradshaw. ‘That’s all we did. Nine or ten people die every day in road accidents. So, what did we achieve?’
    ‘We struck terror into their hearts,’ said the fifth member of the group, popping a stick of chewing-gum into his mouth. Samil Chaudhry’s father ran a fast-food franchise in Leeds, and years of eating burgers, kebabs and fried fish had given him the build of a sumo wrestler by the time he was a teenager. He’d had a miserable childhood and had hated school, where he had been teased mercilessly over his weight and the spots that plagued his complexion.
    Everything had changed when Chaudhry turned twenty. He had met two older men in his local mosque and they had offered to help him with his Koran studies, but before long they were teaching him about politics and his responsibilities towards his Muslim brothers and sisters. They never once teased him about his weight but explained it was his duty to keep fit to be better able to carry out the wishes of Allah, that obesity was a sign of Western laziness and that no true Islamic warrior should allow himself to be anything other than in perfect condition. They encouraged him to run, and to join a local gym that they went to, and for the first time in his life he felt he had real friends, friends who cared about him. It was his new-found friends who encouraged him to revisit his roots in Pakistan, and from there it had taken only a little encouragement for him enrol at an al-Qaeda training camp, where he spent six months being groomed in warfare and fundamentalist politics.
    He had returned to Leeds a changed man, and shortly afterwards he had moved to London, signing up for a hotel-management course he never attended. The running and the training meant that the pounds had dropped off, and now that he had turned twenty-five he was lean and fit, with the stamina to run ten miles without breaking sweat. He was, Bradshaw knew, the most volatile of the group and the one who needed the most careful handling. Bradshaw needed Chaudhry’s abilities, honed in the al-Qaeda training camp, but he was constantly having to rein in Chaudhry’s enthusiasm. He would have made the perfect shahid , but Bradshaw had no intention of throwing away such a valuable resource on a suicide mission.
    ‘We should keep up the pressure. Plant more bombs. Kill more of the infidels. Strike while the iron is hot.’ Chaudhry chewed