by HRF Keating
One Man and His Bomb
HRF Keating
© HRF Keating, 2006
HRF Keating has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2007 by Allison & Busby Limited.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter One
Unmistakably, there came a rumble of distant thunder. Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens, whisky-and-ginger in hand, exhausted after a long day, straightened up with a jerk. Opposite, John, back from his labours at mighty Majestic Insurance, six o’clock glass of chardonnay beside him, gave her a raised-eyebrows look.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’m nervy after these past few days. Or, maybe I’m just not expecting thunder, out of a clear sky. It’d be less surprising if it were next month, before an April shower. But — I don’t know — it seemed somehow … foreboding.’
‘The Hard Detective feeling threatened by a faraway peal of thunder?’
‘I thought,’ Harriet replied with a touch of snappishness, ‘we had a pact you’d never mention that label they put on me back when I was in B Division, stamping on petty crime.’
‘Sorry, sorry. We did have a pact. Old habit, teasing you. And you’re right, thunder often does seem threatening. But it only seems so. Perhaps because everything, when you come to look at it, is always slightly threatening.’
‘Everything? Always?’
‘Oh, yes. Being threatened’s a condition of life, I often think. There’s always something. Who’d have thought, over there in Hasselburg last week just as EuroVin, joyful celebration of wines, was about to begin, that those huge casks each contained an explosive device? Hundreds of deaths.’
‘God, yes. We should have switched on the News. There might have been more facts. How could I have pushed it all away, even for a moment? When my workload’s suddenly gone through the roof? And perhaps at last got to be worthwhile.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that. You were getting to be fairly boring, on and on about Birchester’s non-existent terror precautions. What was that nice phrase you had about your duties? Yes. Busy, you said, building ivory bomb shelters.’
‘Well, it’s what I was doing. But Hasselburg’s changed all that. If al-Qaeda’s going to aim at intimidating us simply by killing as many people as they can, they could quite possibly target Birchester. We’re not such a different city from Hasselburg, even though we haven’t been — what was it al-Qaeda said? — making a god of forbidden wine.’
‘You’re right, of course. Hasselburg’s changed everything, if it wasn’t in fact the bombs in Madrid that did that.’
‘So here am I, suddenly worked to a frazzle, checking security at the football stadiums, gingering up the Railway Police, locating all of Birchester’s share of immigrants, innocent or possibly not.’
She gave an ironic grunt of a laugh.
‘And only a week ago I was asking myself what there was here as a possible terrorist target. The university? A handful of big factories making what they call consumer disposables? That Heronsgate place, the Government agriculture research lab over in Boreham? Hardly worth any terrorist’s while, that.’
‘Could attract anti-vivisectionists.’
‘That’s different. And in any case, that piece in the Star the other day about some tremendously effective herbicide they’ve discovered actually mentioned they never used animal testing.’
‘You’re right about that. But you seem to have missed the follow-up.’
‘Probably came straight after Hasselburg. I haven’t seen the wretched paper since then. What have I missed?’
‘That the people at Heronsgate House are supposed to have gone on to experiment a bit too vigorously with their herbicide. I don’t know how the Star found out, or even if the story was accurate, but they said its genes were manipulated to the point where the stuff began to multiply unstoppably. Something like what happened in California when they created by mistake a hyper-virulent form of tuberculosis. Now there’s a real threat, if you like.’
‘Point taken. Threat number forty-thousand and eight.’
‘OK. So that peal of thunder just now can mean anything you like to make of it. It could even portend something cosily pleasant.’
‘I don’t think so. These aren’t cosy days.’
‘I know what you mean. We’re menaced, no getting away from it. But, it’s still true that all threats aren’t necessarily of evil. Some are simply bugaboos, which my dictionary calls sources of groundless fear or dread. That’s why people watch horror films. To have a nice safe shiver. Or even it’s when, years ago, we took the twins to that awful pantomime Babes in the Wood. Remember? They loved seeing the wicked Baron send the two babes into the horrid forest because somehow they knew, aged four or five, that the birds would come along and cover them with nice warm leaves.’
Harriet raised her glass in a mock toast.
‘May all our threats be bugaboos.’
And the phone rang.
For a long moment she sat and looked at it.
‘You going to pick it up?’ John asked, grinning. ‘It’s nearest you.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. But are you expecting a call?’
‘Much more likely to be duty for you. Unless it’s one of your mates wanting a girly gossip. Life must go on, you know, despite Hasselburg.’
‘All right. Only one way to find out.’
Harriet pushed herself to her feet and went over.
But she found her mouth contracting into a tiny grimace as she recited the number.
‘Mrs Piddock?’ asked a male voice she could not recognise.
‘Yes. This is Harriet Piddock.’
There was a short silence at the far end. A gathering of something. Thoughts collected? Some announcement re-formulated? Courage being plucked up?
‘Mrs Piddock. This is Superintendent Charles Robertson, in charge at Notting Hill police station.’
Notting Hill. Thoughts went scrambling and scuttling through Harriet’s head.
Notting Hill PS, where Malcolm and Graham were in their first posting since they decided to enter the police and serve in the Met. Why is this … this Superintendent Robertson calling about them? Some misdemeanour? Joint misdemeanour?
But the superintendent’s heavy voice was ploughing on.
‘Mrs Piddock, I’m afraid it’s bad news. Very bad. It’s your son, Graham. I’m sorry to say he’s — he has been the victim of a booby trap. He — he’s been killed, Mrs Piddock. And — and PC Malcolm Piddock, who was with him at the time, has been seriously injured.’
Harriet felt her whole world turned in an instant upside down.
It was as if a huge sheet of rusted iron had been swung, between one moment and the next, through a whole hundred and eighty degrees, carrying her with it into a totally different existence. An existence filled to every last corner with blank, black, overwhelming grief. There was nothing anywhere. Nothing. Nothing but utt
er loss.
But in her right ear, she knew, that leaden voice was plodding onwards, dealing out the facts. Somehow she had become two people. There was the one who was truly her, in that new different world, grief-struck, grief-filled. And there was another. There was someone, something, altogether like her, but not her. A hologram. Something made out of a criss-crossing of innumerable laser beams. A non-person, yet capable of doing whatever a person does. Of listening to that ongoing, thumping voice, of taking in what it was telling her, of making the right brief noises of acknowledgement. Of all that, but nothing else.
Chapter Two
Hologram Harriet heard John asking, with a note of quick anxiety, whether she was all right.
‘You’ve gone absolutely white. Harriet, what is it? What is it?’
And the hologram was able to answer, putting the phone handset back on its rest as if the call had been no more than one from one of her mates, as John had called them.
She turned to face him.
‘John, that was the man in charge at Notting Hill police station, a Superintendent Someone-or-other. John, it’s Graham. And Malcolm too, really. Graham’s been killed by some sort of a bomb. And Malcolm, who was with him, is in Intensive Care at St Mary’s, Paddington. He’s unconscious, and — and they fear the worst.’
‘But what happened? What bomb? What sort of a bomb?’
‘They haven’t got the full evidence yet, of course. But apparently the boys were proceeding along Ladbroke Walk. That was what he actually said, Superintendent, yes, Robertson. It’s a sort of mews just behind the police station, and they were on their way to take the tube to Marble Arch to be on anti-terrorist patrol on the platforms there. It seems they’d been doing that duty for several days, and were in the habit of making their way to Notting Hill tube along that traffic-free back-lane. And from how they were lying when they were found — it — it looks as if they were investigating some sort of parcel or package put outside the door of one of the houses there. It was a booby trap, they think. They’re sure. And Graham must have moved it and set off the explosion. Or — Superintendent Robertson was a bit confused about it — the explosion may have been set off from a distance just as they got there.’
John, she saw now — the hologram saw — had gone as white as she herself must be.
‘But why them? Why our sons? Both. Both of them.’
Abruptly he got to his feet. ‘No. We must go. To Malcolm. Get down to London as fast as we can. He might — he might be — What time is it? Yes, not seven yet. Harriet, you’re not still on duty, are you? We could set off now, straight away, and be there by ten at the latest?’
She heard herself give a harsh bark of a laugh. She realised then that John, however impulsively he was behaving, had remembered the answerphone and was putting a message on it before hurrying her out to the garage and the car.
*
She was scarcely aware of anything more as John drove, at and beyond the limit, through the cold of late evening, stars glinting, down the motorway, heading for London and St Mary’s, Paddington, where Malcolm was perhaps on the very point of death. Real Harriet and Hologram Harriet merged into one blankness.
At last she was conscious that they had arrived. That John had found a space to park, whether illegally or legally, right outside St Mary’s. Stumblingly, she followed him, confused by the street lights and shadows, as he strode over to an illuminated map of the hospital complex. With a jabbing finger he located the words Intensive Care, wheeled her round, went back into the street, marched along to an entrance-arch and pointed, like an over-dramatic actor, to the illuminated Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother building. Then, striding with her into the darkness past other dimmer unlit buildings — there was a flower shop, Hologram Harriet noticed — he crossed an internal road without looking to either side, swept past a tall bronze statue of a wounded wartime Civil Defence worker nursing a naked foot and pushed open some glass double-doors.
A barked question to the security man behind the desk and, almost without being aware of how she had got there, Harriet found herself looking through a wide tinted window at an appallingly still figure, heavily bandaged, that she had been told was Malcolm. Tubes were in each nostril, a drip was feeding into an arm, another fat transparent plastic tube lolled inside the mouth, wires were fastened to flesh here and there. Just beyond, a blue line on a VDU screen was ominously darting and quivering. Something else was emitting occasional little bleeps. A green-clad doctor bending forwards was doing something Harriet could not, mercifully, make out to the horribly inert body.
That was Malcolm. Malcolm. Still, at least, alive.
*
Malcolm was holding his own, so a sympathetic blue-tunic nurse told them. But he was by no means out of danger. Apart from multiple injuries to the lower half of his body, she said, he had sustained a single more serious one when a small flying piece of metal had penetrated his head. It had been successfully removed, but it had left him in a coma.
Little of the medical jargon meant much to Harriet. All that she took in was that there was hope still. The threat of the unthinkable end — unthinkable, but all too urgently present — was only hovering, still at a distance. A short, short distance.
It must have been a long time later that she felt John take her arm at the elbow and begin to steer her away.
‘I’ve been having a word when the chap looking after him came out for a break,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I don’t think you even noticed. But he says there’s little point in our staying on. Either he’ll …’
She knew what he was telling her. Knew all too well.
Still steering her, he led the way down steps, round corners, down other stairs, until they arrived at the brightly-lit entrance lobby once more.
And there, left on a ledge, was a discarded newspaper with blazoned across its front page, impossible to miss, ‘PC Twins in Terror Bomb Blast’.
John snatched it up, for a moment made as if to hide it from her sight, then realised that there was no point. He stood there in the light of the neon tube overhead, his eyes tearing into the short account under that somehow dagger-like headline. At last he looked up.
‘Nothing more really than we know already,’ he said. ‘It’s tomorrow’s Banner. Must be the edition they print for Scotland, quite early in the evening. There’s hardly any detail about what exactly happened. Just the facts. But — But how the hell did they get hold of this about the victims being twins? That damned awful human-interest touch?’
His face momentarily contracted in anger, sheer exhaustion overcoming his customary control.
He pushed the paper back on the shelf, shoved open the glass doors and stepped with Harriet into the cuttingly chill night outside.
‘Look,’ he said, as they stood there, ‘I’m really not fit to drive back home. I don’t think I was even fit to drive down here. I suppose I may just manage now to get the car to somewhere safe to park. But then I’m going to find a hotel and hope to get some sleep before going back up tomorrow. Will you stay down here with me?’
Harriet thought, tried to think.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘John, I want to go home. Home. Couldn’t you …?’
‘Darling, I can’t. I just wouldn’t be safe on the road. I absolutely can’t. But if you really do want to get back home, that’s Paddington Station looming at the end of the road there. I think there should be a late train. Could you manage that? What do you think?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘Yes, I would like to be at home, somehow I feel …’
John went with her then along to the big empty echoing station. They found the last train to Birchester was due to leave in seven minutes. A ticket to be bought. The platform to be located. Then she was leaning out of the carriage window, making a pale effort to wave towards John’s dark figure as the train moved away.
She fell back on the seat behind her and sat there. Before long she realised that tears were rolling down her cheeks. On and on. Impossible to stop,
even if she had the will to halt them. Impossible to stop, even if opposite her there had been a row of concerned and curious travellers.
There were no thoughts behind the outpouring. A total inner blankness. The mere feeling of intolerable pain.
Then perhaps sleep, of a sort. Or mere oblivion.
And a porter opening the carriage door.
‘Birchester, madam. Far as this one goes. You all right?’
‘Yes, yes. I’m … I just need a cab, if there is one.’
‘Oh, yes, should be. I’ll see you to it. Nothing else to do, this time of night.’
*
She woke, as she always did, at seven. For a few minutes, unusually, she simply lay where she was. And she found there were still two Harriets there in her head, not even side by side but superimposed one on the other. The real one, still weighed-down with grief. The hologram, emotionless, able to think rationally about what Harriet should be doing.
Go into Headquarters? Carry on with her attempts to counter the possible threat of a terrorist attack in Birchester? But no. A terrible blow had been delivered to her, to her and to John. She could not be expected to work in any calm, orderly way. No one, in fact, when they heard on the radio what had happened or read about it in the Birchester Chronicle, would expect to find her in her office.
But she must have news.
Malcolm. Had he got through the rest of the night? Ring St Mary’s? No. No, John will almost certainly be there already, or will be very soon. And the moment he knows anything he’ll ring me. So, wait.
And, yes, Hologram Harriet said to herself, I must get up now, shower, be ready to cope with whatever has to be done, eat a good breakfast. Or however much I can.
Stepping out of the shower, feeling a little better though unable not to rebuke herself for perhaps having cast away a particle of mourning, she heard the phone shrilling. At once Hologram Harriet realised the answerphone must still be on.
God, I forgot last night that John switched it on. What if I miss …?
