The Balance of Guilt Read Online Free

he ignored it.
    They turned off the A38 and reached the outskirts of Exeter. The main road in to the city was conspicuously clear. But outbound it was gridlocked. The faces in the windscreens were pale, taut and drawn.
    Dan turned up the volume. A reporter was at the scene of the attack. She was describing the crowds of people milling around. The relentless ringing of mobile phones as panicked people called those they knew were in the city. The frightened families looking for mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters. They were wailing, shouting and screaming, calling out the names, pushing and pulling at people in the crowd, checking faces.
    The hugs of relief as some were reunited, too emotional even for tears. The continuing anguish of the many still searching.
    The roar of the police helicopter hovering in the air. The impending arrival of the security service, FX5, and SO15, the Counter-Terrorism Branch of the Metropolitan Police.
    Always these things happen to someone else, a woman was saying. Always.
    But not today. Today, it happens to us.
    One more road. One last turning.
    The air was full of sirens. Streams of people were walking, jogging, stumbling away. Some were sitting, smoking, propped against walls and buildings. Others sat on benches and car bonnets with heads bowed or just staring. Eyes wide, filled with fear.
    Terrorism had come to Devon.
    *    *    *
    They parked just inside the remains of the medieval wall, on double yellow lines, but it wasn’t the kind of day to worry about that. Nigel scrambled the camera, tripod and microphone from the boot of his car, Dan helping. Police cars kept rushing past, their blue lights washing from the glass of the shop fronts. They jogged across the road and into the green.
    Professionalism dictated they started filming at once. But not today, not on this story.
    Dan and Nigel stopped, stood still, and joined the crowd around them in simply staring.
    The famous view which had graced tens of thousands of newspapers, magazines and postcards, websites and billboards, and recreations from artists’ canvases to schoolchildren’s notepads, the very symbolic heart of Exeter, had been defiled.
    The magnificent stained glass window of the façade had been destroyed by the force of the explosion. The cobbles were strewn with jagged fragments of rainbow glass, many shining in their spectrum of soft colours as they caught the afternoon sun. Some of the pieces were larger, one depicting a green valley and running river, cut in half by the blast. Another, the body of a shepherd, the words find redemption beneath. Others were shards and splinters, angled edges of blue and red.
    Wessex Minster had been blinded.
    ‘Shit,’ Nigel hissed. ‘Just – well – shit.’
    From the peak of the open arch, a trail of smoke wound up towards the sky. The once bright stone had been blackened with charcoal stains. A few lonely fragments of sharp glass around the base of the window had survived the blast. Dan, squinting, could make out the remnants of a disciple’s robes and half a cross.
    He breathed out heavily. Around him, in the crowd, people were pointing, some shaking their heads, others just staring, but for such a mass of people there was a remarkable silence.
    They could sense the violation. No words were needed. All understood the hatred unleashed here today. The desire to anger, rage and outrage. To spit bile into the face of society.
    Dan reached out a hand and gently held Nigel’s shoulder.
    ‘Sorry,’ his friend whispered, slotting the camera onto the tripod. ‘I just – well …’
    Dan stood behind him, watching Nigel’s back as he captured the scene. As they filmed, another slice of the window slowly peeled from the stone frame and clattered onto the cobbles.
    A low moan echoed through the crowd.
    A couple of paramedics emerged from the side door of the Minster, supporting an elderly man. Bandages covered his head. They walked slowly towards a