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Yard was also anticipating trouble. The TSG officers present at the scene were fully equipped for riot control.
    Several pop-up tents had been erected on the pavement opposite the hotel. White-overalled forensics techs scoured the pavement along the line of shops behind them, carefully sweeping broken glass and fragments of wood away as the walked. There were only two things they could be looking for: bomb fragments and body fragments, one to piece together the cause, the other to piece together the effect.
    With a clearer view around the TSG vans now she saw a number of S52 neo-Nazis were beginning to congregate beyond the barrier. ‘Solidarity 52’, a loose affiliation of disaffected former members of the English Defence League, Combat 18 and the BNP, had already decided this was a terrorist attack. And there was only one breed of terrorists these days.
    Two uniformed officers emerged from the tavern directly across the road from the hotel and walked away towards a mobile incident truck parked by gates of the Embassy. Fine dust covered everything, and the ground crunched minutely as Leila picked her way through the debris towards the hotel.
    The western end of hotel’s five-storey tower had collapsed downwards and backwards into the subterranean parking garage and spilled across the entrance to Kensington Palace Gardens. A fire service ladder unit was parked close to the building, its ladder extended over the wreckage. Search and rescue were working their way upwards around the rubble, stopping, listening, moving on; a crane parked at the cordon fifty yards further along Kensington High Street was waiting to do the heavy lifting when the rescue of survivors turned to the search for bodies. At the moment the two German Shepherd sniffer dogs clambering over the building indicated there were still people to rescue.
    A black man in civilian clothing jumped down from the back of one of the ambulances and walked towards the entrance ramp to the underground car park. Leila followed him. Something about him didn’t fit.
    ‘Hey, wait,’ she called. He turned towards her. ‘You police?’
    ‘No. Private security.’
    ‘Then you can’t enter the building. This is a crime scene.’
    ‘TSG know I’m here. And you are?’
    ‘Here to see what the hell’s happened. What do you know?’
    ‘I know we’ve got eight confirmed dead, forty-something serious injuries. It could have been a lot worse considering the location.’
    ‘Most of the blast was contained underground by the look of it.’
    The man nodded. ‘There’s still about thirty hotel rooms we’ve not been able to enter yet,’ he said.
    ‘What about the Embassy?’
    ‘They’re not talking to anyone.’
    ‘Foreign soil. If they don’t want their casualties counting towards our totals, that’s fine. Were you here when it went off?’
    ‘Over in the park. I’m Ruth Morgan’s body guard, Gavin Byers.’ He held out his hand. Leila ignored it.
    ‘And Miss Morgan’s where now?’ she said.
    ‘I left her at the Palace.’
    ‘Good.’ She nodded.
    ‘I’m going back inside,’ Gavin said. ‘You want to come along?’
    ‘I’ll catch you up if I need to. Just want to get a feel for the place first.’
    Gavin took a hard hat from the back of the fire tender and stooped into an opening at the foot of the tower.
    It was obvious that this had been a bomb. The rooms immediately above the car park entrance had collapsed, but the east side of the building was largely undamaged. Had this been a gas leak in the underground facility, the rolling ignition of gas would have directed most of the blast out of the openings in the building, and probably wouldn’t have caused much in the way of structural damage at all.
    But Byers was right: as far as deaths and serious injuries were concerned, it could have been a lot worse. If the bomb had been detonated at street level rather than underground it would have caused carnage.
    She walked on a few yards towards the corner of