The Path of the Bullet

by M C Jacques

  McKay remained deadpan, scanning the novae-traditional internal decor of The Old Forge and wandering, as he did so, how much of it reflected Lisa’s and how much Matt’s preferences. “Obviously, he’s got her flat on Mill Road covered, pretty much twenty-four seven as far as I can tell. I may just be able to shed some light on things soon – I’m expecting either a call or an email any time after noon today.”

  “Well, just you make absolutely certain that you keep me posted! Do you hear?” Fothergill’s index finer zipped up and down at McKay, his forearm sinews taut and defined.

  In the first instance, McKay felt like lifting the surly idiot off his feet, slamming him against the timbered and cream plastered kitchen-diner wall and demanding to know how on earth the cretinous Fothergill could even dare to imagine that he was in any position to call the tunes. McKay’s fervour, though, was checked by the reluctant realisation that he may still need the goodwill of the RWM’s Director, should matters regarding Sarah Millar – and her cadre – develop in the way he feared they might. On that point, what news, if any, will Burrows convey from forensics? When would John call or email next? His eyes flashed fleetingly at his chunky mobile phone – his Mars bar, as he sometimes referred to it. No call yet, at any rate.

  “I think you will find that DI Burrows and his team are doing everything they can, and possibly a little more, in order to get this sorted. When you’re dealing with the type of people we may well be dealing with, as the poster in the World War Two Control Room puts it, ‘Careless talk costs lives’ – and may very well have done so already. You get on with keeping your staff calm, helpful and available and leave the rest to the police. I help where and when I can. In fact, I’ve got to get off to Lakenheath airbase now – what’s the journey time from here?”

  “Allow about forty-five minutes,” muttered Fothergill, following a brief scowl, issued not so much at McKay directly but, rather, at life in general and at how Fortune’s deft fingers appeared to be dealing increasingly duff hands to him. “Jill, Andy Fordham and now Sarah. We just can’t afford to lose her, Mark! She’s turned the finances and visitor figures around, virtually single-handed! But there’s a lot going on with her, isn’t there? Honestly?” His eyes pleaded, but were mercury cold. He peered downwards into the sedimentary remains of the coffee in the lavender-patterned mug.

  Rising from the pine bench aside the table, McKay nodded slowly. Just how much actually had been going on in the life of Sarah Millar was soon to be made a little, yes, a little clearer.

  Fothergill opened the door impassively, silently. The men exchanged cautionary looks in each other’s direction, bidding an unspoken farewell, drowned by their own thoughts and the drawing of lengthy breaths by the other.

  Crunching his way across the mushy gravel drive to the car, the Motorola in his pocket began to shiver and shake: ‘John F – Office’ in grey letters on a green and grainy backcloth flashed frantically.

  “Mark. More on what I mentioned embryonically last time. Right. Are you sitting down? Well, get this! I think we’ve got a handle on your Al-Salaam fellow. Listen good…”

  39

  Burrows and Sutton, Riyadh and Regrets

  Distracted momentarily, McKay came around to find himself studying the Smiths’ instrumentation and its mahogany lodging upon the Scimitar’s sweeping dashboard. Glancing over at the large lounge window of The Old Forge, he thought, but possibly only imagined, that he had just outlined Fothergill’s profile: still, unflinching and facing his way. He needed to call Burrows urgently now, following his call from John Foote, but felt too uncomfortable to do this parked in the Fothergills’ driveway. And as the large tyres of his powerful car rolled across the stones sedately, resisting all temptation to make them do otherwise, he wondered, for the first time in this affair, how the blazes he had ever allowed himself to become involved with the murder of an army man he had never even known, the suicide of a man he had met only once, and the disappearance of a woman he had never even conversed with. This was McKay’s first case and he was bitterly regretting having anything to do with this ‘detection’ game already, and it was not to be the last time he’d feel this way.

  Years later, one blustery spring afternoon, he was meeting an old friend at St Bees Point on the windswept Cumbrian coast. Betwixt sipping piping hot, milky tea in a café they had visited once previously, during a youth club camp in their mid-teens, McKay insisted that it is only when a person is hard pushed, desperate even, that he or she can honestly discover their true, ‘patent’ self; what the real person inside us is like, ‘When the rubber hits the road,’ he recalled saying, ‘that’s what, who, we are left with.’ In a similar vein, McKay came to understand that there is nothing quite like mental exasperation to precipitate the pooling of one’s mental resources. Of course, McKay went on to explain to his old school friend that, at the time of the Sergeant Smith murder at the Royal War Museum, along with a compounding suicide and a vexing disappearance, his greater problems remained emotional ones: he was recently bereaved, separated and – having lived a hermit’s lifestyle at Oxford for the previous twelve months – now felt himself to have been eschewed by mainstream society. Looking back, to use his own expressions, at the time of the RWM case he had felt ‘out of step with people, and out of sorts with life itself’.

  Having been briefed previously about the possibility, even the likelihood, of phone tapping, McKay curtailed his conversation with DI Burrows to what seemed to him to be the more salient points.

  “I see, Mark. Thanks for this and thank your guy in Manhattan on our behalf, too, if you’d be so kind. I know you’re going up the A11 to Lakenheath now, but when might you be able to get over to that GR7 place near the museum? And to that accountant, that financial chappie you just mentioned? I can get a couple of guys across to do it if you wish, or WPC Sutton would jump at the chance to assist!”

  “Thanks, Paul. I’ll chew on that one.” McKay’s mind felt lightened and airy for the first time that day.

  “I could send her in plain clothes, if you wish. She cuts quite a figure!” The Detective Inspector’s unheralded merriment was transmitted by his tone, too. There was no cruelty intended or, indeed, exported, through Burrows’ jousting with McKay, but just the casual, gentle salvoes that married men shoot towards their single counterparts from time to time.

  McKay needed to render his disquieted mind a little clear before he could proceed any further. Drawing his Psion out of its soft leather pouch, he pushed the cable’s stout plug into the otherwise redundant cigarette lighter in the central well, beneath the dashboard; the duotone screen soon beamed light and current.

  He scrolled down through a lengthy, bullet point-style list of case notes until they ceased. Then he added the following:

  Only suspected links with Al-Salaam:

  Ibrahim al-Taqara attempted to open an offshore account with immediate access with C A Dickinson Financial Services, Ivy Bough Cottage, Six Mile Bottom, Nr Newmarket. VISIT.

  40

  Stevie ‘Jay’ Gould

  Heading northwards, inspired by the stirring instrumental mid-section of Camel’s Lady Fantasy, McKay knew, in truth, that he was pushing his dad’s aging Scimitar more than he should have been. Although it would soon be pushing towards its twenty-eighth year on the road, the 1973 Scimitar GTE SE5a had been completely overhauled not long before its previous owner’s unexpected and untimely death. At the same time, it had also had an extremely well-tuned QED Rover KV6 engine implanted – indicating to McKay that his late father really had been a selfish and reckless cad… right up until the bitter end. However, it had also crossed his mind that it might just indicate that his late father had somehow been made aware of, or else had prognosticated, his forthcoming demise.

  The glistening pools of oily water swished against the wheel arches and fibreglass body of the tired vehicle as the needle on the Smiths Instruments’ speedometer straddled the A11’
s legal limit. Accelerating away at the Elveden crossing, McKay was lucky indeed not to smash into the rear of a newish Porsche 911. Moreover, as the Scimitar slipped past, the astonished driver of the 911 indicated his disapproval of McKay’s somewhat unrepresentative driving style digitally.

  McKay seemed to skirt the perimeter of the famous airbase for an eternity before finally arriving at the main entrance.

  When the icy glaciers slinked their retreat from the East Anglian landscape, they bequeathed an aquarian legacy of small pools, replenished by bustling subterranean springs, bubbling and sparkling their way through fissures in the chalky strata which had been deposited, in the aeons of time, by primordial seas.

  One such spring, with a vintage of around three thousand years, still gurgles forth amidst the military clamour and roar which is RAF Lakenheath. Indeed, flint tools (and some possible weaponry) found on the Lakenheath base date back over seven thousand years. Nearby, at Peacekeeper’s Park, or Caudle Head Mere to use the Saxon name, the remains of a village from the heart of the Stone Age had been unearthed.

  McKay’s historical and archaeological genes were racing but, fortunately, not before he realised that he had allowed himself to creep a little too close to the rear bumper of the blue Dodge immediately ahead of him, which was also indicating to turn off in to the base.

  His mind drifted on to more recent times as he waited patiently for the paperwork of the Dodge’s occupants to be scrutinised by the military police.

  He was aware, from his dad, that Lakenheath had been used for target practice in the First World War, but its ‘modern’ history had really begun in 1940 when the RAF deployed it as a ‘decoy’ airfield to nearby RAF Mildenhall.

  Next, its runways, the longest of which strode two thousand feet, were used as a satellite airfield to Mildenhall. In late November, 1948, operational control was transferred to the United States Air Force in Europe (USAFE).

  McKay also recalled, distantly, a near nuclear catastrophe when a bomber in training – was it a B-47? – had crashed into a nuclear missile storage facility at the base. Four of the aircrew were killed but the nuclear missiles were not detonated.

  The military police at the CCTV-ridden gateway were courteous if not obviously friendly. “Mr Gould will be along shortly, Dr McKay. Please just take a seat over there.” McKay was shown into a plain little room with a visible electric wall-mounted heater, white like the emulsioned plaster to which it was screwed. The room looked to date from the 1940s or ‘50s and McKay supposed that it was one of the buildings erected when the US Air Force acquired the base in 1948.

  The smooth matt surface of the rather stark grey walls was punctuated by what McKay took to be various optics and sensors; a second reminder that the US Air Force were not considered friends by a sizeable chunk of the world’s citizens and powers.

  Stevie ‘Jay’ Gould was a slight, bearded man whose age didn’t readily volunteer itself to onlookers. He held out a bony, sinewy hand towards McKay as he approached. “Hi Mark. Stevie Jay; just call me Jay. Good to meet you at last!”

  McKay returned the cordiality. “And you, too. The Wing Commander gives you flying colours!”

  “Indeed. He’s a grand old guy, although he’d probably split my nose open if he heard me refer to him as anything like old!”

  Within ten minutes the newfound colleagues were studying all the material available on the ballistics report on the Jill Prestons shooting.

  “Establishing precisely the path of the bullet is key here, Mark,” proclaimed Jay evangelically. “Two shots, very different calibres – we need to sort out exactly who shot what from where…”

  “And when,” interjected McKay obligingly.

  “Exactly right,” asserted the wiry Jay as he steered and repositioned another large format print of the entry mark of one of the bullets – this one through Jill Prestons’ upper cranium – his narrowed eyes straining to spot every last detail from the extremely high definition digital photograph.

  Photograph after photograph was meticulously examined under various lighting formats: blue tungsten, neo-phosphorous, fluorescent and shuttered window daylight, which was already beginning to fade steadily but conspicuously. McKay recalled that it was during their third round of coffees that Jay’s inexhaustible scrutinising paid dividends. “Mark, here’s something! Now, just take a look at this!” He handed McKay one of ballistics’ large format prints of a bullet recovered from a piece of wooden planking used in a display near Jill Prestons’ corpse; it had penetrated the skull, the right, upper cranium and exited slightly lower on the left.

  Jay was animated with enthusiasm. “You see, Mark? Look closely. The path of the bullet we have here means that it ended up embedded in that soft pine board, quite low on the board work behind poor Jilly Prestons’ corpse.” (McKay noticed that Jay employed similar terms and sentiments to those of Mountfitchet when he referred to Prestons). “Now, my guess is, and tell me to shut it if I’m selling you stuff you already know, but this might indicate that this slug was the second one. I’d put my bottom dime on the fact that this slug tore through Jilly when she was on the ground. Perhaps to make sure she was good and dead, check?”

  McKay nodded soberly. “Check. Anything more on the gun?” The slight American placed down his ‘50 Years of Lakenheath’ mug on the bench surface and nodded back.

  “Check his out, too: the gun which threw out this slug, as your ballistic guys say, is a Dragunov sniper rifle, an SVD we know it as, or a Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova Tupos 79, to give its formal name – standard Soviet Cold War issue from the Izhervsk Mechanical Plant.”

  “Not Tula?”

  “No. Not the Type 79. But the interesting thing about the beast that fired this slug is that it was not a Russian-made gun! No sir! Look at the barrel scores on the slug. The Russian-made barrels are as smooth as silk, bet your last dime on it, every time. This one is even more roughly machined than the copies of the SVD 79s I’ve seen which are made in China.” Jay looked across at the silent, expectant McKay pensively.

  “I’d bet my last chips, my bottom dollar, that the gun which spat out this slug was made in Iran. Have you spoken to that Director guy, Max Fothergay, about this?”

  “Fothergill? Matt Fothergill?” corrected McKay gently.

  “Yep, him! We’ve a fellow here in the diner called Max Fothergay! Anyway, your man is a firearms man, yes sir! Must be in at least a dozen different associations, societies and the like – all to do with guns. There’s quite a few of our guys who’ve met him on the circuit, y’know, at stuff like that!”

  41

  Meetings…

  The Scimitar ground to a halt near the entrance to the museum and McKay darted in as the skies lost their grip of the chasms of water they had been retaining. Within very few seconds, huge drops pounded thunderously upon the roof of the recently refurbished entrance hall. Around the complex, on the concourse and pathways, pools bubbled over and channels of water began to seek out their next lowest point.

  “I didn’t tell you or Burrows, or Mountfitchet because I didn’t think it was in any way relevant to Smith’s murder. I was nowhere near! As you well know! I didn’t do it!” bellowed the RWM Tuxford’s Director at McKay.

  “And you didn’t think it to be relevant when we found the body of your 2IC in the Warfare on Land Hall?”

  “Oh sure, I’m bound to put a bullet or two into Jill, aren’t I? She was good… damned good, in fact.” Fothergill waited, paused. McKay didn’t.

  “Even if she was a little clingy, Max?” Fothergill’s eyes flashed back, burning with anger. “At times, now and again.” McKay successfully deposited slightly greater emphasis upon the last word than he would normally have done.

  “That is none of your f… none of your business whatsoever, or Burrows’, either.” McKay remained unflinching.

  “Well, you might not be the one who decides that. N
ow where exactly is your collection of guns – which is, I understand very impressive and very comprehensive; one of the best collections outside of the Royal Armaments Museum, I’m told? Oh yes, and we’ll need a comprehensive list of all the people who’ve been, or even who could have been at some point, within a mile of them over the past twelve months, pronto!”

  Fothergill, standing ‘twixt his blue velour swivel chair and mahogany desk, leaned forward and rested his weight on his two outstretched arms, his head moving sideways in either direction as he spat contempt as silent as he was able to. He looked up, tie loosened, beetroot-necked. “Okay, McKay, if you really need to know, it’s at the back of The Old Forge. There’s an outbuilding at the side. It’s in there, my gun collection. I keep it quiet. It’s secure, safe as the Bank of England. Don’t you tell another living soul, right? Lisa’s nervous enough about me keeping them there, as it is! It’s not just that they’re valuable, you know, financially, but the majority of them have been restored to a high level of accuracy and functionality.” (Yes, by the late Handy Andy, no doubt, thought McKay quietly). “They are live weapons; valuable to collectors, terrorists and nutters! Keep that in mind before you go blabbering to Burrows and his cronies, some of whom I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw them. I caught some Arab or Pakistani PC snooping round the outbuildings one day, whilst good old Burrows was chatting to Lisa – probably ogling her chest!”

  “I doubt it. DI Burrows is a professional, Matt, and a very happily married man, I understand. I’ll speak to him about this, I must. But you have my word that I won’t tell another soul. By the way, did you get the name of the PC whom you saw sniffing around at The Old Forge, close to your gun collection?”