Terror in London

Gordon lived with his long-time girlfriend Yvonne Carr several miles north in the north London borough of Enfield. Now, approaching 11pm, it would be hard to get back. So he asked one of his female friends if she would let him sleep at her flat in central London. Gordon crashed on the couch. "Jamie was in really good spirits. It was a great night all round," said one friend.

Early the following morning Conrad Murkitt was getting ready to begin his usual Thursday commute into the capital. Murkitt, a successful computer executive, lives in the pretty village of Thrapston on the edge of Northamptonshire's Rockingham Forest. He had been making the long journey down to the Reuters building opposite the Millennium Dome for the previous two months, since picking up work with the news agency. As usual, he packed his MP3 player into his briefcase before waving goodbye to his wife.

At the same time, Dr Peter Holden, a GP from Matlock in Derbyshire, was having breakfast in a flat in Tavistock Square, in central London's Bloomsbury district, which he uses on his weekly trips to London. One of the British Medical Association's GP representatives, Holden was reading through his notes prior to a meeting with health ministers later that morning at Richmond House in Whitehall to discuss doctors' working conditions.

Three ordinary people, among the millions of others in London preparing to go about their daily business. Within hours, however, each would be caught up in an atrocity which shattered lives. America still mourns its 9/11. This weekend London, Britain, has 7/7.

While survivors of the September 11 attacks nearly four years ago recall the dazzlingly bright autumn sky which broke that September day, last Thursday dawned grey, murky and unusually chilly in the capital. But the mood in London was similar to that of New York that fateful Tuesday morning. The threat of a bomb attack was far from the minds of the commuters heading to work. They had, in the words of many office workers speaking later in the day, become blas. "We had become so complacent. There have been all these scares, but no one ever really gave it much thought any more," said one.

Indeed, any sense of danger had been further muted by the euphoria of the previous day, when a vast crowd in Trafalgar Square had danced with joy as London was proclaimed the host for the 2012 Olympic games - a victory made all the sweeter by the fact that England's capital had beaten Paris. "This is the truth," declared London resident of 50 years and columnist David Aaronovitch in a eulogy to his city, written on Tuesday last week. "London, on the way up, has passed Paris on its way down. London is the city for the young, for the traveller, for the lover of experience. And it's beginning to dawn on us all just what a great place it is."

On Thursday morning, this was a city happy with its lot. The bright flags and pennants of Lord Sebastian Coe's victorious bid were fluttering in what would become, as the day wore on, a strong blustery wind. London was preparing to enter a golden era to challenge any other period of its long and glorious history.

Another early riser that morning was Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. By 7am he was seated in a chauffeur-driven car on the way to Shepherd's Bush, where he had a 7.20 appointment. BBC Radio 4's Today programme wanted to quiz him on whether the capital was prepared for the terror threat in the run up to the Olympics.

Perhaps buoyed by the optimism of the previous day, Sir Ian adopted a bullish tone. "We have been described by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary as the envy of the policing world in relation to counter-terrorism and I am absolutely positive that our ability is there," he declared. At that point few would have questioned his confidence: Scotland Yard and MI5 had already been credited with foiling up to five terrorist attacks since September 2001, including one alleged attempt by al-Qaeda to fly two planes simultaneously into the towers of Canary Wharf and Heathrow Airport. On another occasion it is thought that training programmes for suicide pilots were disrupted, as well as planned chemical attacks on the Tube. Sir Ian's predecessor Sir John Stevens had declared prior to his departure that it was a matter of "when not if" there would be a massive terrorist attack on London. Was Sir Ian on the verge of turning Sir John's phrase around?

An hour and 20 minutes after Sir Ian's radio broadcast, Conrad Murkitt was not troubling himself with such weighty matters. In fact, he was nearly falling asleep. Having got off his train from Northamptonshire at King's Cross, he had faced his usual choice of whether to travel on the Northern line or the Circle line - both of which headed in his direction. Delays on the former persuaded him to take the latter. Against habit, he got a carriage near the front of the train. "Normally, I take a carriage at the back of the train because it is easier to get off but instead, I went on there. I don't know why," he said.

He put his MP3 headphones to his ears and let the music play. It was 'Get in Touch with Yourself' by Swing Out Sister. Murkitt closed his eyes and waited for the journey to end.

Over in Bloomsbury, Peter Holden left his flat and popped round the corner to his usual coffee shop. He then walked the short distance to the British Medical Association's London HQ, in Tavistock Square like his flat. He climbed to his office high above the square and began chatting with his fellow BMA negotiators, including Dr Mary Church, a GP from Lanarkshire who had travelled down from Scotland earlier in the week.

Nearby, Jamie Gordon was still recovering from the exertions of the night before. With no commute from Enfield, he was able to enjoy a more relaxed morning. It would be around 30 minutes before he decided to head out to work.

By then, the world of Conrad Murkitt would have been turned upside down. At 8.50am, as his train was heading westwards between Liverpool Street Station and Aldgate station, the terror attack that Stevens had predicted began. In the third carriage from the front, a bomb thought to contain less than 10lb of explosives, and almost certainly contained within a backpack or suitcase, was detonated next to a set of double doors. The Aldgate train was the standard London model, built of a tough steel frame upon which aluminium bodywork is bolted firmly down. It was no match against the blistering power of the bomb. The explosives ripped a gaping hole in the side and floor of the carriage, instantly killing passengers in the immediate vicinity. Murkitt was two carriages behind. "We had no idea what had happened," he said. "It just didn't occur to me that this was deliberate. There was panic at first because people thought the smoke was from a fire. But it cleared and didn't get any worse. We just waited for a while."

Two carriages up, however, was a scene of carnage. Teve Talevski, a coffee shop manager from Crouch End in London, was there. He had been on his way to a meeting in Parsons Green in southwest London. The grinding drag of getting across the city, he recalled, had been allayed by a brief encounter on the platform. "As I stood on the platform, a young woman in front of me, wearing a delicate blue dress, turned around and flashed me this enigmatic smile. I smiled back. I can still see her face now."

Minutes later, the scene was very different. The shock of the explosion gave way to the horror of the sights before him, and the nauseous smell of burning rubber and flesh. "A man lay on the floor, apparently alive, with the bloodied body of a woman on top of him. I felt as if I was in a trance," he said. Steve Nichols, London Underground chaplain, arrived quickly on the scene."There was one poor lady who had been impaled by one of the poles in the train and she was still alive," he said. In total seven had been killed and scores more injured.

In the confusion behind - where the true devastation of the scene was still not known - Murkitt and a fellow passenger were prising open a door to try to disperse the smoke. Finally, the blessed sight of police searchlights entered the tunnel. The passengers were told to walk to Aldgate station - a path which meant having to go past the stricken carriage up front. Finally Murkitt was confronted with the reality of what had happened. "They told some of the women with us who were panicking not to look." But Murkitt did. "There was one guy who looked like he had had all his clothes ripped off and was just covered in blood from head to foot. There was metal everywhere."

On the station, Murkitt quickly called his wife back in Northamptonshire - who had not yet realised that her husband was in peril. He walked up into the fresh breezy London air. The city that greeted him was no longer the same.

That London was under attack was confirmed within seconds. Contrary to reports that the tube bombs had happened over a 30 minute period, police revealed yesterday that the attacks were almost simultaneous, occurring within 50 seconds of one another. Two more blasts - one just south of King's Cross, and another at Edgware Road station - tore through the capital.

King's Cross was the most deadly attack of all, made all the more horrific by the fact that the Piccadilly line on which it took place is one of the deepest parts of the entire network, often accessible to passengers only by escalators. The narrow tunnel was 100 feet below Euston Road. Cut off and with the tunnel walls of the tube line around them close to collapse, the passengers were cast into a dark hell.

Right at the front was 28-year-old commuter Mark Margolis. Only an hour before, he had kissed his wife Sarah goodbye at their home in Fulham and set off on the daily trip to his office in Finsbury Park, where he worked as a project manager for a software company.

Margolis was reading his book just a few seats from the front of the train, when the blast ripped through the carriage behind him. Carrying up to 1,000 passengers, the train had just left King's Cross and was heading towards Russell Square. The bomb hit a full train's length into the tunnel, at the front.

Somehow, despite being close to the epicentre of the blast, Margolis escaped serious injury.

"It went dark suddenly, then there was lots of screaming," he recalled. "I thought we had hit something and there was a fire - I could smell smoke. All I could think about was that if there was a fire we were not going to survive and I knew we had to get out of there.

"Everyone was screaming, all the glass had been blown out of the windows and I cut my head. There was blood flying around."

The survivors were then forced to undergo their second terrifying ordeal - the long black walk to the station, with the stench of smoke still thick in the air, and a powerful electric current in the track below. Adam Stacey, 23, had been talking to fellow passengers about the success of the Olympic bid when the bomb struck. "We had to stick close together and avoid the live rail," he said. "When we emerged from the tunnel, the scene was like a disaster movie, with a fleet of ambulances and fire engines."

Twenty-one were already dead. There may be many more: police admitted on Friday that there were still bodies trapped. One of them is thought to be 37-year-old Mike Matsushita, a tour guide from the US who had quit his finance job in New York after the attacks on 9/11. He was planning to marry a British woman.

The lucky ones who made it to the top all followed Murkitt in what became a reflex first action: they phoned their loved ones. Soon the mobile phone network was disabled to allow emergency services a clear line.

Margolis's wife Sarah was nearby in Russell Square when she took the call. "I knew he had been hurt because he started the conversation by saying he was OK. At first I didn't recognise him as he was covered in blood and dust, there was blood streaming down the right hand side of his face and all over his shirt, he was also completely black."

For the emergency services, the work was only beginning. For veteran police Inspector Ray Shields the mayhem was all too familiar. He had travelled early down to King's Cross from his home in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. He had also been there in 1987, when the fire in the underground concourse killed 31 commuters. Now, 18 years on, as a senior British Transport Inspector, horror was unravelling once again.

Shields and his fellow officers dashed down to the track the moment the explosion was heard and began trying to haul out the passengers trapped within the tunnel. The scene was chaotic. Only passengers on the King's Cross side of the blast could be hauled out: the vast majority were trapped behind the blast site which had blocked the tunnel entirely. The police on the King's Cross side saw the worst of the damage. Sergeant Steve Betts, one of the British Transport police officers first to reach the scene, gave a harrowing account of the mayhem.

"I am not very good at enclosed spaces at the best of times and we had to climb over bodies and body parts to try and help people. I found a man and his leg had been blown off below the knee. There was another body next to him. There was also what I thought was a pile of clothes but as I passed to try and get to the man, it moaned and asked me for help. It was a woman. She had all her limbs blown off. I think she died on the concourse," he said. Human endurance was being tested to the limit.

The Edgware Street bomb was particularly cruel. Like the other two, the device was placed near the front of the Circle line train, in the second carriage at the standing area by the first set of double doors. But such was its force that it tore through both the frame of the carriage and the wall of the tunnel itself. On the other side of the wall, another train was hurtling past in the opposite direction. It ran over the debris from the bomb's impact, causing further mayhem. In all three trains were affected.

If anything, the scene was even more chaotic than at the sites of the other two explosions.

Carol Miller from Oxford was on the train travelling in the opposite direction from the one hit. "People were screaming, as you'd expect, in that situation. I saw one lady who was ripped to pieces, lying between the two trains. People were trying to help her.

"There were two tubes crossing in different directions. As it [the other train] got to our carriage it exploded. It was a massive explosion and immediately everything filled up with smoke."

Ben McCarthy was several carriages from the explosion on the train which was hit.

"It was probably only about 200 metres out of Edgware Road station, heading towards Paddington when there was this loud explosion. A man was blown out of the door of the train, he was under the carriages. Everything was black and filled with smoke for a while.

"It was terrifying. People were incredibly calm but very, very shocked. The screams from the guy who was under the train obviously made the whole incident so much worse."

As with all such atrocities, heroism emerges. In this case, it was 28-year-old Paul Dadge, a worker for Internet firm AOL, and formerly a part-time fireman. His own train stopped at Edgware Road after the blast ahead. He immediately dashed to the scene and began assisting the bloodied passengers - unwittingly making the front page of many of the next day's newspapers as he aided a woman called Davinia who had been given a gel mask to protect her badly burned face.

"As a firefighter I had first aid training and that just kicked back in," he said. "There were two paramedics on the scene and they were setting up a casualty point at the Marks and Spencer nearby so we began taking people there and triaging them."

Of Davinia, he said: "She had burns to her face and head. She was very distressed. I saw a lot of wounded people and didn't really have time to think about what was going on."

"I just want to get the message to the terrorists that we won't be fazed by what they have done here."

Three bombs, dozens already dead. It was not yet 9am. At the London Underground network control centre at Broadway, in St James's Park, staff were frantically trying to assess the damage. From the centre, staff can track the progress of every train on the network. The stoppages on both the Circle line and the Piccadilly line were now flashing up on their screens, alerting the head of network control, Andy Barr, to the possibility of a serious emergency. Long-prepared procedures, contained in the Underground's emergency plan, began to swing into action. Yet there was still confusion within the office about what exactly had happened.

Media organisations were demanding to know what was going on. A holding answer was given: all the fuses on the lines had been blown, providing evidence that there had been a "power surge". Experts believe the claim about a power surge gave London's emergency planners a crucial few minutes to set up their action plan. It may have achieved this, but it also meant that, across the city, few were aware that terrorists were striking London - and the last bomb had not yet detonated.

Over at the Royal London hospital, they were getting ready for the injured who would soon arrive. Despite the calamity of the morning, London had been blessed with an extraordinary piece of luck. Just as the first bomb went off at 8:51am at Aldgate, no more than a mile away, 32 A&E specialists were meeting to discuss their tactics for major emergencies in the capital. Crews of the helicopter emergency services were there, along with the senior specialists from the Royal London.

Within minutes, a call was relayed: they were needed now. Dr Gareth Davis was at the scene in Aldgate almost immediately, putting into practice his special Physician Response Unit which aims to take Accident and Emergency care straight to patients rather than waiting for them to come into hospital.

Waiting for the victims at the Royal London in Whitechapel - having hot-footed it from the meeting - was chief A&E consultant, Dr Alistair Wilson. "At the time the bombs hit, we were all there in the same place ready and waiting to go," he said. "We had enough doctors on duty to have handled four, five or six times the number of injuries."

Back over at Tavistock Square, Peter Holden - a veteran of the Hillsborough disaster - could already sense that something was wrong. Sitting in his office high above the Square, he could hear the wail of police and ambulance sirens which were beginning to descend on nearby King's Cross station.

Above, a police helicopter was flying. Holden, who as well as running a busy GP practice also works with the Civil Air Ambulance, flying to police scenes, was annoyed. "I was cursing because I hadn't brought my binoculars. I wanted to see what the opposition were flying," he said. The news of a power surge on the network was seeping through, but the doctors at the BMA gave it short shrift. In the streets below, at around 9:30am, Jamie Holden was beginning his journey to work.

At the same time, news of the tragedy was beginning to trickle upwards to the highest political offices. At the moment the first bomb had gone off, Tony Blair was walking through the grounds of Gleneagles Hotel enjoying a morning stroll with George W Bush.

It was a glorious Perthshire morning and the mayhem of the previous day's protests had subsided. An Olympic victor - and now host to the world - Blair was in buoyant form. Just before nine, and still unaware of what was unfolding in London, he and Bush held a brief press conference to discuss their plans on tackling global warming.

Then Blair retired into one of the hotel's many suites for a private meeting with Hu Jintao, the Chinese President. Towards the end, First Minister Jack McConnell was invited to join them, and given a few precious minutes with the two men to discuss strengthening trade links between China and Scotland. Yet McConnell had even less time than he thought.

As he was delivering his pitch, an aide bent over Blair's ear. Faithfully repeating the rumours still circulating, he told the Prime Minister there had been a "power surge" in London. The meeting was immediately cut short. Blair, it seems, was not one to be fooled.

By the time the first meeting of the full G8 was due to begin, the Prime Minister had begun to fear the worst. It was confirmed shortly afterwards. A devastated Blair stood silently in the Gleneagles sunshine pondering his move. He would have to return to London.

At Downing Street, there was feverish activity. The cabinet had been meeting early that morning, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. The agenda had been predictably dull - nothing exciting is expected to happen when Tony Blair is out of town. Then, suddenly, Prescott was facing up to perhaps the Labour government's gravest national crisis. Every minister around the table noticed when an aide entered the Cabinet room halfway through and passed a note to Charles Clarke.

The Home Secretary read the first warning that London was under attack with a deep sigh, and immediately passed the details to Alistair Darling. The Transport Secretary left the room to make a frenetic round of phone calls to the officials and bosses of the capital's transport network.

So far the damage inflicted by the bombers had been subterranean. Soon, however, the ghastly spectacle was to erupt on the streets itself.

By 9:40am the police and emergency services were on full alert. Euston station and King's Cross were both in the process of being evacuated. Confused commuters were being herded into what appeared to be the safe haven of the quiet streets of Bloomsbury, with some being taken towards leafy Tavistock Square, dominated on one side by the grand red brick facade of the British Medical Association's headquarters.

On its front is a blue plaque declaring how Charles Dickens once lived on a site nearby. It was here, at this stately and historic site, that al-Qaeda's fourth and final bomb would strike, spattering the walls around the plaque with the blood of Londoners.

By 9:42am, Jamie Gordon had left his friend's flat and decided to call his office ahead to let them know he was on his way. It now seems certain he hopped on board the No 30 bus, packed with evacuated tube travellers. At 9:47am, a massive explosion echoed through Bloomsbury.

Holden, still looking wistfully up at the helicopters in the distance, leapt backwards in his office. "Immediately we knew that it was a bomb. I could see the white smoke and the cordite. You could smell it," he said.

Holden's training in emergency situations immediately took over. He urged his colleagues to put their instinct to rush out to one side, warning that professional bomb attacks were usually followed by another, to "mop up" helpers and by-standers. They waited ten minutes. Then, using the stairs for fear that the office lift could be damaged, they rushed downstairs.

The bus below, taking passengers from Hackney Wick to Marble Arch in central London should not have been going through Tavistock Square. It had been diverted from its normal route due to the disruption at King's Cross. As a result, progress was tortuous and the passengers were getting frustrated.

One of them, Richard Jones, 61, an IT consultant from Bracknell, Berkshire, was getting particularly annoyed - not at the traffic but by the bizarre behaviour of one man on board.

"Everybody is standing face-to-face and this guy kept dipping into this bag," said Jones. "He was standing next to me with a bag at his feet and he kept dipping

into this bag and fiddling about with something.

"I was getting quite annoyed with this because it was a crowded bus."

Jones decided to get off, just as the bus reached Tavistock Square. It was a decision that probably saved his life. The carnage at the scene was appalling. Body parts lay strewn across the street. Dazed passengers and driver George Psarabakis, in obvious shock, began helping stricken passengers who were still moving out of the shredded red Stagecoach vehicle. "I thought I had hit the kerb," said Psarabakis. "I looked round. The back of the bus had gone."

Across the immediate area, workers came to a halt. At the Royal College of Archeologists, adjacent to Tavistock Square, academics were disturbed from their labours. Jane Siddell, a 36-year-old archeologist, said: "We have builders in the office and at first I thought that they had dropped a skip. But then the builders came running and said that they thought there had been an explosion."

Siddell and others quickly ran over to the bus. Holden and 14 other doctors from the BMA were already there.

"By the time we got down there, people were already being brought in on collapsible tables," he said. "Then we set about our job.

"The first hour is absolute chaos, the second hour is organised chaos and by the third hour you are just about getting things going."

He added: "We had head, chest, abdominal and limb injuries. It was the complete opposite of what you usually face in these situations. Usually, you have a lot of kit and no staff. This time we had a lot of staff and no kit."

Ambulance crews quickly reached the scene and, with Holden, set up a makeshift hospital within the BMA's blood-spattered forecourt. For at least 14 passengers on board, it was too late. But, to the doctors' credit, only one person who had been brought through the BMA's portals after the attack failed to make it. Jamie Gordon was not among them. All that was found the following day - by his desperate girlfriend who was searching the scene of the bomb - was the mobile phone he had used to call his work just minutes before the explosion. He is still registered as missing; but it seems certain that he was killed.

The savage attacks had taken a mere 56 minutes. A city which had awoken aflame with pride as an Olympic city had been reduced to a panic-stricken silence, broken only by the regular wail of police sirens. In total, 208 victims were rushed into the Royal London, some ferried there by London buses which had stopped to pick up the walking wounded. A further 95 patients were rushed to the University College Hospital, 59 to the Royal Free and 36 to St Mary's Hospital near Paddington. In total, 700 were injured. Yesterday, the death toll hovered around 50. No-one believes it will not be higher.

As the scale of the attack became clear, London's emergency planners immediately swung into action. The city's Mayor Ken Livingstone should have taken control but was still to leave Singapore following the Olympic victory. Authority was thus passed to Sir Ian Blair - now back at New Scotland Yard after his BBC interview - to convene the Gold Co-Ordinating group, bringing together police, council leaders, emergency services and transport and port authorities under one umbrella. In the absence of Livingstone, Sir Ian would be the public face of London's response. The group then hurriedly packed up and, by lunchtime had moved out of danger in central London to another centre in Hendon. At Downing Street, ministers were already meeting in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A - known as COBRA - the government's emergency Cabinet committee which sits in times of national crisis. At 10am, Darling, Clarke, his predecessor David Blunkett, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Defence Secretary John Reid filed through the passage linking 10 Downing Street with the Cabinet Office. There, down several flights of stairs, they were joined by senior police, health and emergency services managers.

It fell to Clarke to brief the Prime Minister during a separate call. "The biggest difficulty was establishing what the number of events was," Clarke said. "We reported this to the Prime Minister in a conference call at Gleneagles. He decided to come to London to deal with the problem and, rightly in my opinion, to go back to Gleneagles."

COBRA was then briefed by the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI6, John Scarlett, and Sir Ian Blair. Reid said the Army was ready to do whatever was required. Chancellor Gordon Brown - an eye on the fast plummeting markets - emphasised the need to get out a "business as usual" message. The Committee adjourned at 10.45. "My two preoccupations were firstly to deal with the situation that was actively on the ground, and to identify the people who had committed the crime and prevent it from happening again," Clarke said. "What actually happened was that we were in Cabinet and learned about the events in a very incoherent way."

As Clarke remained in the Cabinet Office, pondering over the "scope and scale of what had happened", back in Gleneagles, Blair hurriedly composed his initial response, to be delivered on live television barely 10 minutes later. The brief statement, delivered haltingly and with genuine passion in the Scottish sunshine, prepared the ground for the broader declaration, made with the visible backing of all the world leaders gathered at Gleneagles, an hour later.

Shortly after that, Blair was gone, ferried by Chinook helicopter to Dundee Airport and then flown by jet to RAF Northolt. Weary Downing Street aides confirmed that the journey, made with Blair's chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell, was no simple round-trip. "Tony didn't do his normal thing of coming through from Northolt into the centre of London by motorcade, because that might just disrupt things. He was just helicoptered across London to the south bank of the Thames."

Similarly, Blair was restrained from visiting any of the disaster sites, the hospitals, or even making a single public appearance during his few hours back in hands-on control. Like Bush immediately after the first news of the September 11 attacks reached the White House, Blair's room for manoeuvre was heavily restricted by concerns for his personal security.

"We needed to know that it wasn't an ongoing incident," one government aide said. "If you go to the scenes of the incidents on the day they happened, then you are getting in the way."

While Blair was in the air, Clarke was briefing his Conservative and Liberal Democrat shadows in advance of his promised statement to Parliament. His appearance before a chamber packed with MPs was delayed when he climbed the stairs in the Speaker's apartment to deliver a personal briefing to Michael Martin before giving the official version of events to parliament.

In a televised statement delivered that evening, Blair addressed the nation, praising the "stoicism and resilience" of Londoners. In what had already become the mantra of the day, he added that such acts would never destroy the British "way of life".

Even then, many Londoners - their stoicism and resilience tested to the limit - were still not home. Almost all public transport had ground to a halt. All those who had taken the tube to work were now marooned. And rather than face the long walk home, some had chosen to book into hotels in the city centre. One branch of the Holiday Inn spontaneously offered reduced rates for the stranded commuters. For those that did get home, the stark drama of the day finally began to sink in. PR consultant Bruce McLachlan, 28, who had been travelling on the train that was bombed at Edgware Station, took an hour and a half to get home, walking all the way from his office in Bayswater, west London to Angel. "It wasn't until I got home and was watching the news with my girlfriend that I started to feel emotional," he declared.

As the people of the city retreated to the arms of their loved ones, others began to fear the worst. Many who had headed out that optimistic morning were simply not coming back. As the evening wore on, and Jamie Gordon failed to reply to frantic messages, his girlfriend Yvonne Nash began a desperate search. "Is he dead? Is he alive? Not knowing is dreadful", she wept.

As dusk fell, showers descended on the capital. Police boats patrolled the silent Thames. Restaurants and bars shut up shop, either out of respect for the dead or fear of a further attack. The following morning, Yvonne Nash was still searching. "It's been nearly 24 hours," she said. "I just have to find him. I have to know what happened." She would soon be joined on the streets by hundreds of other relatives and friends, carrying haunting images of their missing loved ones, who in the photos had smiling faces blissfully ignorant of the tragedy that was to come their way. The agony was only beginning.