A Matter of Trust (28 page)

Callum held up his battered leather briefcase. ‘As I told you on the phone a while ago, I found out why Sir Vivian was killed,' he said simply. ‘And I think I know who did it as well.'

Lisle nodded. ‘Yes I know, you said. Dr Naismith. Yes, I agree. Did you know her current partner is an Olympic champion archer with a crossbow? It's not too great a leap to suppose that the lady herself is conversant with how it works.'

Both men seemed unaware that they were stood in the middle of the pavement outside the entrance to St Bede's, beside a busy street, where anyone could overhear them. Now that he'd finally met up with Lisle, Callum wanted nothing more than to unload his burden onto the police, get back to Markie, and put this whole sorry episode behind him.

He suddenly realised how natural the thought of going back to Markie had been. Already, it seemed, his subconscious was beginning to think of her as someone permanent in his life. He felt himself tense as he thought of what he'd have to do tomorrow. Breaking up with someone was never easy—especially when you knew how special they could be to you. But that was just the trouble—he couldn't afford for Markie Kendall to mean
so
much to him.

Luckily for the three men, the commuters milling around them were too busy trying to get home, walk to bus queues or get to their parked cars to bother with the huddle of men blocking the stream of pedestrian traffic.

As people dodged around them, Callum began to explain his day's activities.

‘As I told you, I found a fifteen year old thesis in Sir Vivian's study in his cottage,' he began crisply. ‘It was by a man named Brian Aldernay, and . . .'

‘
Aldernay!'
Lisle all but shrieked.

Both Jim and Callum stared at him in blank amazement. Lisle quickly snapped his mouth shut, and took several deep, calming breaths.

*           *           *

Unaware of the nearness of their men, in the car park and sitting in Nesta's car, Markie and Nesta began to fasten their safety belts.

It was exactly two minutes and twenty-one seconds since Rosemary Naismith had armed the bomb.

*           *           *

‘Forget it,' Lisle said gruffly, suddenly aware that the two men were gaping at him, as well they might. ‘I just recognised the name, that's all,' he explained feebly. ‘Please, carry on.'

Callum
nodded uncertainly. How had the policeman come across the name of Aldernay before? Did he know more than he was letting on? ‘The thesis was a brilliant one, and nearly completed. From Sir Vivian's notes on it, I knew that the student concerned had been a graduate here, and had been killed in a bicycle accident before he'd had the chance to present his D.Phil.'

Lisle's eyes narrowed. ‘Which added up to what, exactly?' he asked ominously. Just wait until he got back home to Nesta . . . .

*           *           *

At that moment, Nesta was reaching for the car keys, about to turn the ignition. It was now two minutes and fifty-eight seconds since the bomb had been armed.

*           *           *

‘I also found out that Brian Aldernay's supervisor at the time of his death was . . .' Callum began, but Lisle was not about to be robbed of his moment.

‘Rosemary Naismith,' he said flatly.

‘Yes! Did you know this all the time?'

Lisle shrugged, not about to divulge to a member of the public what the police did, or didn't know. ‘This thesis. I take it that it's relevant?'

Lisle
was enjoying himself enormously. He wouldn't have been human if he didn't enjoy besting one of the best brains in Oxford—in the country, even.

Callum found himself smiling slightly. It was never a good idea to underestimate the police, it seemed.

Blissfully unaware of the drama taking place in car park just a few hundred yards away, neither men would have been so happy if they'd known how Rosemary Naismith had spent her afternoon.

*           *           *

In the Volkswagen Beetle, Nesta turned the ignition and revved the engine.

They now had less than two mintues to live.

*           *           *

‘Yes, it's relevant,' Callum said firmly, and was bumped from behind when a secretary leaving the college, and hurrying to catch her bus, failed to see him in time and jogged his elbow in passing. Callum instinctively half turned, and began to walk slowly down the alleyway, towards the college car park, and Lisle and Jim fell into step beside him.

They could hear the sound of a car revving in the car park now, but none of them paid much attention, save to step to the side of the
alleyway
to make room for it when it happened to pass by them.

‘This thesis was, save from a few finishing bits and pieces, the same thesis that Rosemary presented as her own D.Phil, about nine months after Aldernay's death,' Callum explained bleakly. His words echoed off the narrow walls of the alley. Apart from a dim streetlight it was dark and eerie in the narrow passageway.

Lisle suddenly shivered. For some reason he felt a grim, dark, nasty sensation of impending disaster. It was a repetition of what he'd been feeling all day, only stronger. More urgent. He couldn't understand it. He was not used to ‘feelings' like this. His career had been based on good old-fashioned foot work, research and logic.

He tried to shrug it off.

*           *           *

In the car park, Nesta put on the headlights and the heater. ‘You don't mind if we wait a minute for the old buggy to heat up, do you?' she asked Markie, who was also shivering.

She glanced ruefully at the windscreen, which was fast misting up, and shook her head. ‘No, not at all.'

Outside, the three men were only a few yards from the postern gates that led to the car park.

‘So
you're saying that she stole this chap's work?' Jim Neill said, picking up the thread of Callum's argument.

Callum nodded. ‘Yes.' Catching Lisle's look of disbelief, he shrugged and smiled sadly. ‘It's not as hard as you might think. Brian and Rosemary were researching in the same field. Everyone who mattered would have known that. And every serious academic I've ever known keeps his work and research and theories top secret. Sometimes even from their supervisor. I doubt Rosemary's own supervisor knew much about her original work for instance.'

‘They're so close-mouthed and possessive, I suppose, 'cause they're scared someone's gonna pinch their ideas?' Jim guessed sardonically.

Callum sighed and nodded. ‘You know,' he said wearily, ‘I'm getting really fed up with research. With teaching even. With Oxford. All the academic in-fighting and back-biting is getting me down.'

Lisle and Jim exchanged glances, eyebrows raised. That was quite some admission for a University Don to make!

‘But what I don't understand,' Callum carried on, as the three men stepped through the postern gates and into the car park, ‘is how Sir Vivian got onto it all in the first place. All this happened years ago.'

Lisle snorted. ‘I think I can answer that . . .'

In
the Beetle, Nesta turned on the windscreen wipers in a bid to clear the glass. She saw three men in the beam of her headlights.

Callum, being so toweringly tall and fair, was instantly recognisable, and was the first man that both the women instinctively looked at. As they did so, the bomb in the front of the car had been ticking away for four minutes and forty-two seconds.

Markie gave a short yip of surprise and fumbled for the window lever. ‘That's Callum!' she crowed, as Nesta looked across at her questioningly.

Looking out of the cleared windscreen, Nesta's eyes moved to the other two men with him, and instantly recognised Lisle.

‘And Lisle!' she breathed, a great smile of relief and welcome spreading across her heart-shaped face.

The three men glanced across as they heard the squeak of a window being lowered. Lisle recognised the comical little Beetle at once. He took a step towards it.

As he did so, Callum saw a dark head emerge from the window. A pair of dark blue eyes, and a wide smiling mouth. For a moment, his heart lifted, and all doubts and worries seemed to run screaming into the night. It was Markie. And he loved her. Nothing else mattered. All this heart-searching he'd been doing, trying to convince himself it
could
never work between them, as just the action of a coward. He hadn't wanted to fall in love. He hadn't trusted his feelings. Now, in a fraction of time, he saw it all so completely clearly.

All he had to do was trust her. To trust what they had together. It was just a matter of trust, that was all.

His heart soared. ‘Markie,' he said softly, joyously.

Their eyes met . . .

And the car exploded.

Or at least, it seemed to.

Everything happened so fast, and yet in amazing slowness, that it was only later that the police bomb disposal experts were able to put all the pieces together and say what must have happened.

To the two women sitting in the car, though, everything changed in a heart-wrenching instant.

One second they were each looking at the men they loved, and in the next instant, at a wall of flame.

There was a ‘crummppph' of sound, a tearing, squealing, rending sound, like a pig in pain. It was in fact the bonnet of the car being blown off its hinges and into the air by the force of the explosion. Although the experimental bomb had gone off according to schedule, it had not gone off as it was supposed to, in one single devastating blast.
Instead,
there was this first, primary explosion, which had only a fraction of the force it was capable of. It did, however, send a wall of flame shooting up in front of the windscreen, and a rising, bilious cloud of curiously white and pale smoke engulfed the car.

Inside, the two women were thrust back by the force of the airwave deep into their seats.

Markie, with a scream of surprise, instinctively flung up her hand in front of her face, as a scorching wall of heat shattered the windscreen. Beside her, Nesta did the same. Simultaneously, they felt their arms sting to the laceration of a hundred tiny cuts.

Markie felt her chin and the top of her forhead flinch with tiny pinpricks of pain.

Nesta felt her right cheek tingle in sudden cold-hot numbness.

Luckily, both women's cuts were superficial, and would heal quickly and without any scarring, but right at that moment, they weren't even thinking about that. They didn't have time to think about anything. The stench of burning metal and rubber assailed their noses as the spare wheel in the boot caught fire. The smoke went from white, to choking, foul black.

It seemed to envelop the car in a shroud of darkness.

‘Get out, Nesta! Get out!' Markie heard a voice screaming in the darkness, choking in the smoke, and realised that it was her own.
She
tried to reach for the door, but something seemed to stop her.

Beside her, Nesta fumbled for the catch of her seatbelt, and Markie suddenly realised that it wasn't a huge, death loving beast that was determined to keep locked in place, but only her own humble seatbelt. She too fumbled for the catch to free herself.

In the boot of the car, the main set of explosives in the bomb began to heat towards detonation point . . .

The three men outside the car seemed rooted to the spot forever, but it was, in fact, less than a second. Even so, it was hard to believe what they were seeing. Callum and Lisle screamed a horrified ‘NO!' at precisely the same moment.

They both darted heroically forward as the car disappeared into a pall of black, evil-smelling smoke.

The fierceness of the fire, though, pushed them back in a wall of blazing heat that seared their faces, singeing their eyebrows and burning off the moisture on their lips in a matter of seconds.

Markie felt her door pop open and literally fell onto the hard wet tarmac. She was coughing so hard and her eyes were watering so badly she could see and hear nothing.

She felt the car rock slightly, and realised that Nesta, too, must have got free, and gave a groaning sob of relief. Then she scrambled
to
her knees, instinct screaming at her to
run, run, run . . .
to get as far from the car as she possibly could. But she could only seem to crawl.

Jim Neill screamed at the two men to get back, but his voice was drowned out by an almighty crack.

Instinctively, Lisle threw himself to the left, and Callum to the right, as the main part of the bomb exploded.

Luckily for everyone, with the bonnet of the car gone, the force of the bomb exploded mostly upwards, harmlessly erupting its fury in a straight line up to the sky.

Nesta, who'd managed to get to her feet, nevertheless felt herself catapulted forward by the shock wave.

She hit the wall of the car park with a ‘whoomp' and crumpled to the ground. Lisle, who'd thrown himself to the side of the driver's door, saw her slender figure fly through the air as the explosion seemed to batter his eardrums, threatening to burst them.

He cried out in anguish, and before the sound had even died down to a mere ominous echo, he was on his feet and running towards her inert figure, his heart racing sickeningly, his soul cringing in fear.

‘Nesta!'

Markie, who'd still been on her hands and knees when the bomb detonated for the second, more devastating time, felt herself
being
flattened to the ground. Her cheek scraped painfully against the tarmac, and suddenly she was aware of a heavy weight pressing against her, shielding her, as bits of car fell down all around her head.

‘Markie! Darling, are you alright?'

Her ears were still tingling from the huge crack of the explosion, but, nevertheless, she heard his voice clearly. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard.