Falling More Slowly ilm-1

by Peter Helton

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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 cafe 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 cafes and restaurants and takeaway coffee places every few yards. He abhorred drinks in Styr
ofoam 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 cafe 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.

  As the girl set the enormous cup of froth in front of him a loud bang outside made her jump and sharply draw in breath. McLusky tried to reassure her. ‘Just someone dropping stuff into an empty skip.’ He had caught a glimpse of the battered yellow mini-skip at the end of the lane earlier.

  The girl relaxed her shoulders. ‘Well, after what happened yesterday you can’t help thinking. Another one could go off any time, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Is that what you think? That there’ll be another one?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? But it’s scary, isn’t it, if someone blows up stupid things like a pavilion. On the tube you’d expect a bomb, but if they blow up stuff like that then anything could explode next. I never thought it would come here.’

  ‘I don’t think it has. I don’t think it was a terror bomb.’

  ‘Well, if it makes people terrified then I think it is.’

  The girl had a point. As she left to serve other customers he tasted his coffee. His scale of coffee-rating only had three levels — ‘awful’, ‘drinkable’ and ‘the best’. This one was just about drinkable.

  It did however have the desired effect of sharpening his senses. As he continued on his erratic march across town he took everything in precisely, filing away into his memory intersections, back streets, alleys and steps, possible shortcuts. He looked keenly, not like a tourist, but like someone taking possession of a new car, a new house, a new lover. Everything interested him from street furniture to the location of the banks and the number of CCTV cameras. His street instincts were good today and eventually he found himself at the western end of Brandon Hill without having consulted the A-Z in his jacket pocket once. The park was still closed to the public and all entrances were guarded by extremely bored uniformed police. McLusky showed his ID and ducked under the tape. He avoided the locus of the explosion and took a circuitous route to the top of the hill dominated by a hundred-foot tower built from pink sandstone. He climbed the narrow winding stone steps that led him breathlessly to the top. From here he had views across the city in all directions but what interested him lay directly below. It wasn’t exactly Central Park but for a fingertip search it was big enough. There was a large children’s play area, plenty of trees, a pond. The entire area had been combed. There was no separate parks police so Avon and Somerset had provided enough manpower to make sure there were no more devices hidden in the grounds. Suspicious items had of course been found. Two had been blown up in controlled explosions by Royal Engineers; both had been duds. One turned out to be an old dried-up can of yacht varnish. The other had been a rucksack of an Italian tourist, already reported lost. Inside, among other possessions, were his camera and his passport, both now vaporized.