Falling More Slowly (6 page)

‘That’s our understanding. We believe nobody was sitting on the benches when the bomb exploded.’

‘If only she’d got up a minute earlier. That would have been enough, wouldn’t it? A minute? She’d have been far enough away then.’

‘That’s very possible. When did you last visit your sister at home, Mrs Henley?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ She prised another cigarette from her packet and lit it. ‘We don’t see each other very often, that’s all. It’s not that we didn’t get on, we just lived our own lives, it’s just the way it was.’

‘I meant would you notice if there was anything different at your sister’s place, an indication that anything had changed in her life, besides her unfortunate unemployment.’

‘Oh that. I see what you mean. Well, I was there earlier to pick up some things for her, you know, toiletries and that. It was just like it always was, inspector, there was nothing different, not that I noticed.’ She didn’t think she ought to mention that the fridge had been empty and the cupboards almost bare. Liz didn’t do much shopping these days. The flat had felt cold and lifeless.

Austin noted down addresses for both Mrs Henley and her sister before they left the woman to finish her angry cigarette in the chill evening wind.

McLusky drove the car out of the shrubbery so Austin could enter by the passenger door in a more dignified fashion. ‘So, what do you think?’

‘Let’s see. Do I think anyone wanted to blow up Joel Kerswill as he walked back from his interview? Hardly. Do I think Joel Kerswill set the thing off himself? Perhaps. No, I don’t think that either, though I couldn’t tell you why.’

‘A lot depends on what type of bomb it was. We’ll need to know what kind of expertise would have been needed to make it. And the postmistress?’

‘An even more unlikely suspect.’

‘Also an unlikely target. We don’t know how the bomb
was set off yet but it’s possible it was just a prank that went too far. It must be hard to judge just how much home-made explosive to stick into a bomb.’

‘It’ll turn out to be a couple of kids who are at this moment sitting in their bedrooms shitting bricks, waiting for the heavy knock on the door. Another stupid bit of vandalism by kids bored with their computer games.’

‘Might well be. Unless …’

‘You can go left here, less traffic this time of day. Unless what?’

McLusky nosed the car out into the road. This was ‘less traffic’? ‘Unless it was none of these. Unless it was attempted murder but the intended victim was unharmed. And perhaps even unaware he, she, was meant to be blown sky high.’

‘No way. Rubbish way to bump someone off. You’d stick it under their car, surely.’ Austin felt he could talk easily to the new DI, who didn’t seem precious about his own ideas.

‘Quite. Or shove one under his bed. But not his favourite park bench. Always presuming your intended target has a car or a bed, of course. I’m just trying to think of every possibility here since I don’t believe at all in the terrorist angle. We get quite a few tourists, of course, so if you wanted to harm British interests then scaring the tourists away would be a good start. But …’

Austin took up the baton. ‘… but you would blow up a hotel or Temple Meads station, say, not a pavilion. Turn left here, that’s Jamaica Street, that’ll take us back to your neck of the woods.’

‘Right.’ McLusky was committing every turn and street name to his mental map of the city. His new city. It didn’t feel real yet. ‘And it never works anyway. PKK in Turkey, ETA in Spain, a couple of bombs go off and there’s a flurry of holiday cancellations but a few weeks later the bookings go up again.’

‘Which makes no sense since all it does is give them time to get the next bomb ready for just when you arrive.’

‘Also, you would have to keep up the bombings over a long period to do any lasting harm to the tourist business and not many organizations have those resources. Not the kind that sticks explosives in a whisky tin and blows up park benches, anyway.’

‘You’ve given it some thought then. Are you going back to the station?’

McLusky checked his watch. ‘Your car’s down there, isn’t it? I’ll drop you off, but let’s call it a day. After all, Kelper, whatever his rank, is in charge tonight and he didn’t seem to want us around, did he?’

‘It’s all right, you can drop me off outside your place. It’s stopped raining. I’ll walk back.’

He turned into Picton Street. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘Sure I’m sure. Probably quicker, anyway.’

‘Are you being offensive about my new motor, Jane?’ McLusky turned into his street and stopped outside his house. There were no parking spaces.

‘It’s a fine example of German engineering. For the transport museum. No, traffic across town is really bad this time of day, is all I meant.’ Austin got out. ‘See you in the morning.’ He pushed the groaning car door shut.

McLusky cruised and eventually found a space to park near Herbert’s Bakery. The handbrake squawked and the car rolled back a few inches. He left it in gear.

Standing in Northmoor Street he looked up at the lifeless windows of his flat. He didn’t yet recognize it as his own, anybody might live there, it wasn’t home. But then where was? With his mother dead and his father God-knows-where he hadn’t felt at home anywhere for years.

He had no provisions in the house and the place was still a mess. There was really no point in going back there unless he wanted to go shopping first and then clear up the place so he could prepare some food, by which time he would probably be past caring. He walked into the pub instead. The bar at the Barge Inn seemed to take up most of the space though they had managed to cram a few tables
along the windows and the left-hand wall. A pool table had been shoehorned into an adjoining room somehow though you probably had to play with sawn-off cues. There was a door that led to vaulted cellars, available for hire. He ordered a Guinness and asked the barmaid about food. Yes, they did food every night except Thursdays which was quiz night. He perused the blackboard menu. Perhaps the shop across the street was making its influence felt since most of the food was Italian. The most English thing on the menu was probably the chicken tikka. Against his instincts he asked for lasagne to go with his beer and took the only free table, from where he could look up at the blank windows of his own flat. Below it someone was still working at the back of Rossi’s though the place was closed with the vegetable displays cleared off the pavement. There was a newsagent’s at the corner, a launderette called Dolly’s and a strange little shop selling hippy paraphernalia. He knew there was a vet’s, a hairdresser’s, a greengrocer’s and a junk shop just two minutes down the road. A chemist at the other corner completed the impression that McLusky had moved into a small village inside the city.

The food arrived and he ordered a second pint, the first appearing to have evaporated. He certainly felt no different for having drunk it. Halfway through demolishing his lasagne he looked up to catch sight through the window of a man slouching a little unsteadily through the rain towards the pub. He was bleeding from nose, split lip and eyebrows. A moment later he arrived at the bar.

‘Oh no, Rick, what happened to you? Here.’ The barmaid handed him a clean cloth. ‘You been in a fight?’

Rick dabbed gingerly at his nose. ‘Mugged. Bastards got everything.’

‘Oh no, the Mobile Muggers? What’s everything? Were you carrying much?’

‘My money, twenty quid. My credit cards and stuff. I was listening to my MP3 player, they got that. My watch.’ His
voice shook and he winced as he dragged himself on to a bar stool.

‘Poor Rick. Here, get that down you.’ She put a pint of lager in front of him.

‘I can’t pay for it, Becky.’

‘Don’t be daft, it’s on the house. And please don’t call me Becky, I hate that name. It’s Rebecca.’

He took a few deep gulps, pulling a face as the liquid touched his shaky teeth. Blood had dripped on to his jacket which was grimy at the back where he had fallen to the ground.

‘Have you called the police yet?’ The barmaid’s blonde head disappeared below the bar top where she was rummaging about.

‘They got my mobile. There’s no point, anyway. The police can’t catch them. They’ve had their description countless times now, no point telling them again.’

‘You’ll have to report it anyway, Rick, just for the cards and your mobile.’ She had found a first aid box and produced a bottle of iodine.

‘I know but I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ve had enough aggro for one evening.’

‘Go and clean yourself up in the toilet and then we’ll put some of this on you.’

‘No way, that stuff stings.’

‘Don’t be such a baby. And if you don’t cancel your cards now they’ll have spent your money by the morning. Here, you can put it on yourself, I’ve got work to do anyway.’ She walked off to serve customers at the other end of the bar. Rick stayed put, dabbed, sniffed and drank. A middle-aged couple who walked in a few minutes later seemed to know him. The story got told again, sympathy was expressed and they bought him a drink before squeezing on to a bench in the corner.

McLusky had finished his meal and brought the empty plate to the bar, next to the mugging victim. Rick was in his late twenties with dark curly hair and a peeved expression
on his narrow face, which might have a lot to do with recent events. ‘How many attacked you?’ McLusky asked.

‘Four, there’s always four, isn’t there? Two scooters, two riders and two big bastards on the back who deal out the shit and do the mugging.’ He looked morosely into his pint glass.

McLusky guessed more beer would be required soon. It would numb the pain but the humiliation and anger would take time to dissolve. ‘Buy you another?’

He looked up at him. ‘If you like. Thanks. The
bastards
.’ He drained his glass.

McLusky signalled his order across to the barmaid. She seemed to be running the place single-handedly tonight. ‘So what did they look like, your assailants?’ There it was, assailants, perpetrators, suspects. Police speak.
Bastards
.

Rick didn’t notice. ‘Where have you been? Same as what they always look like.’

‘I just moved here. First time I’ve heard about it.’

‘Oh, right. Well, they all wear black. Black jeans, jackets, gloves, helmets. They’ve got balaclavas on under their helmets and they wear sunglasses, one had pink lenses the other yellow. Didn’t see the blokes who rode the scooters really, I was busy getting my face kicked in.’

‘What were their voices like?’

‘Voices? Normal, like from round here.’

‘Young, old? What age, do you think?’

‘No idea, mate.’

A pint of Guinness and one of lager arrived. The girl put the lager in front of Rick. ‘Looks like you’re doing all right out of this, anyway.’

‘You didn’t get a number plate, did you?’ McLusky asked.

‘I didn’t. But they’re always either so muddy you can’t read them or they’re nicked anyway.’

McLusky left it there and returned to his little table by the window. Asking any more questions would have given the game away. He felt he had done enough work on his
first day. Starting with that maniac in the digger demolishing his house and the zippy Skoda. He regretted having sacrificed the car now but it seemed the obvious thing to do then. It would read badly in his report, he knew that much. Not at all how he had intended to start his new job but in retrospect not at all untypical. And then the damn bomb in the park.

If it was a prank then whoever planted it had to have been either unaware of the strength of the explosion that was going to occur or completely indifferent to the possibility that people might be killed. What he didn’t see was why someone would have planted it in that spot if they had actually
intended
to kill a lot of people. Unless …

Unless they had intended to kill a specific person and failed. Or a group of people. Had someone or a whole group of people agreed to be there at a certain time but failed to turn up and thus escaped being blown to kingdom come? Had it been triggered remotely? Was the woman now recovering in hospital the intended victim? At least in his book a bomb to kill a retired postmistress was definite overkill. All these questions had to be worked through and new ones found. Asking the right questions was what CID work was all about. How was the bomb made? Where did the components come from? How was it detonated, etc? McLusky yawned. Tomorrow Albany Road would no doubt be back in charge of the investigation and that’s when he would start asking good, intelligent questions of the team. But for now he had had enough. Possibly not enough Guinness but enough of his first day back at work.

No personal items, no photographs, no Christmas cactus. McLusky was again impressed by the extreme minimalism, even sterility, of the superintendent’s office. Apart from the obvious, the computer screen, the blotter, in-and out-tray, phones and fountain pen, there was nothing much to break up the expanse of clean, clear desk. Denkhaus certainly didn’t feel the need to create a barrier between himself and whoever had the dubious pleasure of sitting in the ungenerously upholstered chair in front of his desk. The rest of the office was similarly functional. The view across the city his window afforded was unimpeded by pot plants or other decoration.

Denkhaus’s impatient, forever slightly irritated energy blasted straight at him. ‘Yes, McLusky, interesting man, Kelper. High-flyer, he’ll go all the way. You should have heard some of the things he talked about. Well, hinted at, all hush-hush stuff really. The budget they have, especially since the London bombings, it’s astronomical. We can only dream … We dined at the Cavendish in Bath last night and –’

‘Then I hope he picked up the bill.’ To McLusky’s own amazement he had given voice to his thought. He hadn’t even heard of the Cavendish before but he was absolutely certain that eating there was beyond a DI’s salary. It just sounded like it.

Denkhaus looked puzzled, not used to being interrupted by smartass DIs. ‘What?’

‘I was just interested, since he wields such a healthy budget. Sir.’ He got the ‘sir’ in far too late to make any difference.

‘That’s utterly beside the point, DI McLusky, and it was hardly clever to bring up the budget! Ours has a sizeable hole in it since you saw fit to use a practically brand new car as a battering ram. I do wish you could have thought of something less spectacular. We’ve been plastered across the front pages of the
Evening Post
day after day for entirely the wrong reasons. You haven’t been here five minutes and you go and give them more ammunition. Yesterday I felt like sending you straight back to where you came from, I hope you realize that?’

‘Yes, sir.’ McLusky tried to look contrite. ‘And what about today, sir?’

‘Today you are back in charge of the bomb investigation. You can count yourself lucky. There’s been a spate of burglaries at properties close to the canal; a plague of muggings, as I’m sure you are aware; a runaway ten-year-old boy; a string of random arson attacks on cars as well as all the usual. But unlike your colleagues you have nothing on your desk. You, DI McLusky, will concentrate on finding what the papers are already calling the Bench Bomber.’ He tapped an early edition of the
Post
, which looked like it had been ironed. ‘I ask you. First the Mobile Muggers, you know, mobile because they steal mobiles and because they run around on scooters. Now the Bench Bomber. They’re loving every minute of it. We really don’t need this. And of course when we can’t give them name and serial number of the perp right away it’s “police are clueless”. If that woman dies, what’s her name …?’

‘Elizabeth Howe,’ McLusky supplied.

‘If Elizabeth Howe dies and this turns into a murder investigation then the pressure will really be on. Go after whoever did this with that uppermost in your mind.’ Denkhaus punctuated his speech by jabbing an index finger towards him. ‘No domestics, no bulldozers. You find
damsels in distress, kittens up a tree or toddlers down a drain, you walk straight past. You concentrate on this.’

‘Yes, sir. What was Kelper’s opinion?’

‘Oh, he thought it had nothing to do with extremism. Home-grown stuff, a prank or a crank. And I think we all agree on that. After London they’re simply too stretched to investigate stuff like this. They insist we can take care of it ourselves. Let’s prove them right, shall we? He also thinks it’s a one-off and the target, the shelter, marks the perp out as a crank. A dangerous crank but not a terrorist.’

‘Let’s hope he’s right. Will that be all, sir?’

‘Yes, but let me have your report on the unfortunate destruction of the Skoda by tomorrow. And for Pete’s sake make it sound good. In fact make its demise sound absolutely inevitable even to the Assistant Chief Constable’s ears!’ Of course the new DI wasn’t the only source of the superintendent’s black mood this morning. For the second time in a month the windows of his immaculate 4×4 had been plastered with mud, this time in a restaurant car park in the Old Town. The crudely made leaflet that came with it claimed that
If the 4
×
4s won’t go to the country the country will
come to the 4
×
4s
. Scores of Land Cruisers, Jeeps and Freelanders had recently got the same treatment. Someone, probably one of the Saturday traffic protesters, was waging a low-level campaign against the city’s gas guzzlers but since no actual damage was being done no action had been taken. There was even a certain level of public support for the mud throwers, which in turn was branded ‘the politics of envy’ by the 4×4-driving camp. Denkhaus knew better than most how stretched their resources were, which infuriated him even more. These days you had to fling much harder stuff than mud to attract the attention of the force.

‘What have you got for me, Jane?’ Without stopping, McLusky called into the CID room by way of sharing around some of the pressure he suddenly felt.

Austin hit the ground running. ‘Colin Keale, the pipe-bomb bloke: he boarded a plane to Dalaman airport in south-west Turkey at 22.50 two days ago, the night before the bomb. From here.’

‘That leaves him well in the frame. He could easily have planted the thing, with a timer, and then conveniently gone on holiday. As an alibi it won’t wash, I want him.’

‘We’re working on it. It was a flight-only deal, so he could be anywhere, but the neighbours think Marmaris.’

‘Okay, we’ll start by applying for a warrant to search his hole.’

‘Right. Witness statements from the park and the house-to-house are all on your desk.’ He no longer addressed McLusky as ‘sir’ but didn’t use his first name, not so soon, even though it had been offered, not within earshot of the others anyway. It was only his second day after all and Jack Sorbie had already ribbed him about ‘his new chum’.
Your
new chum’s getting a right bollocking from the super, mate
.

‘And? Close the door, tell me about it.’ McLusky sank into the chair behind his desk for the first time. It hissed as air escaped from the faux leather upholstery and creaked metallically as he settled into it. He lit a cigarette and looked around for something to use as an ashtray.

‘Ehm, you know this building is no-smoking?’

‘Good for the building.’ He reached behind him and opened the window.

‘Seriously. Even the custody suite went no-smoking yesterday. There’s blokes over there screaming that it violates their human rights. They called for their solicitors. They’re going to sue us.’

‘No win no fag. I wish them luck. Let’s get on with it, Jane.’ He was suddenly not in the mood for banter.

Jane didn’t blink. ‘Well, one woman witnessed a man plant the bomb and she recognized him. He’s been arrested and admitted everything.’

‘Very funny.’

‘We got a pile of statements. Looks like we have a lot of
leisured and/or retired people and quite a few homeworkers living in the streets bordering the park closest to the locus. Most people who were at home around the time of the bombing did look out of the window earlier because of a bloke on a motorized skateboard. Making a nuisance of himself going up and down the paths. Apparently it made a horrible noise, they use little two-stroke engines –’

‘Yeah, I know the things. Bloody menace.’

‘Well, quite a few people got annoyed and had a look at what it was and all saw the same bloke.’

‘The motorized skateboarder … the boy, Joel, he mentioned him. Do we have a description?’

‘Strictly speaking it’s the board that’s motorized of course.’

‘Jane …’ McLusky managed to ladle quite a bit of menace into the word.

Austin rattled it off from memory. ‘Tall, skinny, spiked hair, sunglasses, denims, red scarf and skateboarding gear, knee pads, that sort of thing. Mid-to-late thirties.’

‘Late thirties? You’d have thought he’d have better things to do than skating in the park. Right. I want him. He’s been up and down the street, he’ll have seen something others didn’t. Shouldn’t be difficult to find. If anyone sees a bloke on a motorized skateboard tell them to kick him off it and bring him in. Illegal except on private land anyway if my memory serves me right.’ McLusky stubbed his cigarette out on the aluminium window frame. ‘Okay, I’ll dive into these.’ He pulled the pile of reports towards him. ‘Oh, before you go, what does one do for coffee around here?’

Austin stood in the door, suppressing a sigh. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘No, no, I’m old enough to get my own. Just point me towards it.’

The DS cheered up immediately. ‘Ah, well, in that case it all depends. There’s the machine at the end of the corridor if you like your water brown. There’s the canteen if
you want molasses and there’s a kettle in the CID room, bring your own mug and put 10p in the jar.’

‘Instant?’

‘Instant. DI Fairfield has a cappuccino maker in her office.’

‘Has she?’

‘Only for the inner circle.’

‘And they are?’

‘DS Sorbie, DCI Gaunt, the super … basically everyone above her own rank and anyone below her own rank who’s about to get bullied into doing her a favour.’

‘You ever tasted it?’

‘Not me. It’s not fair trade coffee, if you get my drift. I’ve managed to avoid it so far.’

‘All right. Thanks for explaining the politics of coffee to me, Jane.’ He waited until Austin had closed the door before sliding open the desk drawer and taking out a half-eaten Danish pastry from Rossi’s. Coffee might have to wait though. He started reading the reports, scattering bits of flaked almond over the pages. Everybody had seen something, everyone remembered someone else, only no one remembered anything significant. Those residents whose houses faced the park had given the most detailed descriptions. It was unsurprising. Those actually in the park were all there for different reasons. ‘Taking the air’ were the pensioners, using it as a shortcut were the busy people, ‘hanging out’ were the kids playing truant. Pram pushers, dog walkers and tourists made up the rest; all had their own agendas. But those who lived west of the park had gone to their windows in order to look. Everyone saw the skateboarder. One witness even described Elizabeth Howe, sitting on one of the benches in the shelter, resting with her shopping. This was corroborated by a dog walker in the park. According to him Howe gathered her shopping bags and had just set foot on the path when the bomb went off. Her body was blown forward by the explosion and she twisted while falling, landing back first on the path.
Through some sort of miracle nobody was close enough to the bomb to get killed. Two witnesses saw a couple hugging and kissing earlier on one of the benches. One remembered a young man sitting on the other side, drinking beer from a can. Another saw a three-or four-year-old girl stand on one of the benches before being fetched away by a woman. Lucky family. Nobody saw the container, nobody saw anyone acting suspiciously.

McLusky finished the Danish, licked his fingers and wiped them on his jeans but they remained faintly sticky. He closely read all the reports and notes and got a mental picture of people moving through the park; the skateboarder, woman and child, beer-drinking type, snogging couple, a sprinkling of tourists; Elizabeth Howe and Joel Kerswill walking past each other in different directions. Then the bang. He imagined it from above, watching a silent explosion as from a hovering balloon, saw himself, Austin and Constable Hanham run towards the scene. Too late, it was all too late. McLusky saw it in his mind as though he was there, hovering. He
had
been there and he had been useless. It unfolded in front of his eyes like a movie scene, shot from high above the trees, and he wished he could simply play the film backwards until a figure would walk up, reach for the bomb, put it back into the bag … Because there would be a bag, of course, it would also be quite heavy. Perhaps it had been left inside the bag and that had been destroyed by the blast …

Impatiently he shuffled the papers into a messy pile and pushed his chair back on its castors. How was he supposed to draw a bead on this idiot from these bits of paper? They were out there, somewhere, either kids reading about their own prank in the
Evening Post
or a malicious crank gloating over the column inches he had been given. Far less likely was an inept assassin analysing what went wrong, planning his next move. Since when did they go around assassinating kids and ex-postmistresses? Post … postal workers … mail. No, it didn’t fire his synapses. All he had
was Colin Keale, a known bomb-maker, in Turkey, a retired woman and a kid wanting to be a gardener.

McLusky grabbed his jacket and made for the bathroom down the corridor where he washed the stickiness off his hands, then he clattered down the stairs and out into the thin April light. He never found it easy to grasp a case while locked up inside an office, especially one as dispiriting as the one they had found for him at Albany Road. If you wanted to do policing you had to be out in the street and he didn’t even know most of the streets in this city. As a police officer you had to do more than just know them, you had to own the streets and feel in your bones that you did.
My city, my streets, my patch
.

It looked like a good-enough patch, though there was a chill wind blowing through the narrow lanes of the Old Town. The endless procession of traffic snarled like giant knotted ropes up and down the streets as he walked in the vague direction of the river. Cars, vans, lorries, pedestrians, taxies, minibuses, cyclists, motorized rickshaws and of course scooters squeezed through the unquiet heart of the city. Scooters were everywhere now. They seemed to be the new weapon of choice for many commuters and they were being bought, ridden, crashed and stolen everywhere.

Eventually he found himself walking near a ruined church in a convoluted bit of park. He walked purposefully on into a busy area of tall Georgian buildings. He squeezed through a crowded food market in Corn Street, keeping a sharp lookout. He had planned to enter the first café he found but had already dismissed the first two as unlikely candidates for the
best cappuccino in town
which was what he was looking for. In McLusky’s opinion there really was no point in drinking imitation coffee. Find the best and stick to it. It should only take me a year, he thought, there were cafés and restaurants and takeaway coffee places every few yards. He abhorred drinks in Styrofoam cups and hence avoided the takeaways. The chances that a barista first brewed the finest coffee in town
then poured it into plastic cups were anyway frankly remote. Eventually he simply picked a small café called Cat’s Cradle where a table had just become free. He ordered a large cappuccino from the frizzy-haired girl behind the counter and sat on a cold chrome chair at a cold steel table by the window. He watched the people passing in the narrow lane. At this time of day there were mostly women in the streets, he noticed, and the place was busy. The city attracted a fair number of tourists even this early in the season. Museums, art collections, the science park and historic ships, both real and replica, in the old harbour seemed to be the main attraction.