A Very Big Bang

by Philip McCutchan

  More waiting, waiting all morning. It was once again afternoon, and later afternoon at that, when, like all things, waiting ended: Shard, in the back room again, heard the ring of the telephone, heard Ethel call for her husband. Larger was not long on the phone: the tinkle indicated the cut-off, another tinkle indicated an outgoing call, and soon after this Larger came in. His face gave nothing away but his words brought comfort: Hedge must have got through the net nicely. Larger nodded and said, “Okay. We leave when the car gets here.”

  “When’s that?”

  “After I shut.”

  *

  In London, Hedge — co-ordinated in Shard’s absence, the unobtrusive counter-measures were getting under way. A close watch was placed on all stations, plain-clothes details on a twenty-four hour guard; bomb-disposal teams were quietly drafted in, taking up quarters in Wellington Barracks, together with sappers from Chatham with mine-detector equipment. Helicopters stood ready at short notice to ferry infantry into the capital from Colchester and Salisbury Plain and Aldershot, men who would be used for crowd-control or to empty and seal all stations if the word should come. The files of all London Transport underground employees were checked by officers of the Special Branch. At night in the train-free hours, plain-clothes police and army experts searched subway tunnels, stations and the 238 route miles of the track itself under an official cloak of a structural survey of possible stresses and strains likely to be brought about by a supposedly projected reconstruction of London’s sewerage system. And all the time that Hedge-topped network of careful listeners kept its myriad antennae tuned to pick up any careless talk on the part of terrorism. All that could reasonably be expected at this stage, was being done: but Assistant Commissioner Hesseltine, conferring once again with Hedge, the Home Secretary and the military command, summed it up succinctly.

  “If it happens, we can’t prevent war-scale casualties. There’s still just the one thing: close the system!”

  *

  The car took Shard out of York on the A59 for Green Hammerton, passing on its way the road down which Casey had walked just four days previously. At Green Hammerton it left the Harrogate road and headed on the A1167 for Boroughbridge, after which, crossing over the A1, it made towards Ripon. Larger was not present: Shard had been picked up by a driver and three other men, all British apparently. He sat in the back between two of them, both armed, both refusing to answer questions. From Ripon the car headed out north-west, turning off left into Wensleydale just short of Leyburn. In Wensleydale Shard looked out at Pennine peaks, at low stone walls, sheep on the road, and a rushing river tearing over rocks, at white puffy clouds hastening over the fells: few people, and, outside the small clusters of villages, few houses. Just before Bainbridge the driver swung left, following a signpost for Stalling Busk. The road climbed steeply after a while, ascending a lonely, desolate fellside, heavenward-heading. They dropped down past Semerwater, sunset-reddened and slightly ruffled, climbed again along a narrow track of ruts and potholes. In the isolated village of Stalling Busk, a place of old weatherworn stone farm buildings, the car drove into a farmyard. Behind the cover of the wall and the fading daylight, Shard was brought out with a gun in his spine and ordered through a side door into the farmhouse. He smelt cow and pig, and damp straw: then the door was shut and bolted behind him.

  He looked around: he was in a passage leading to a square hall. Ahead, another door opened off the passage. The house was silent, felt damp from neglect and desertion.

  He asked, “Journey’s end?”

  “Stopover.” The gun pressed. “And grill. Move. Door on your right.”

  Shard moved, halted by the door. A hand reached round him and shoved it open. The room was plain and bare: a table, a chair, a heavily barred window, an immensely strong door. Stone-flagged floor, thick walls of bare stone. Nothing else — just himself, and two of the men, men whom during the drive in he had come to know, unhelpfully, as Terry and Nigel. They were both young and both looked intelligent enough beneath the long hair: not physical thugs, but Shard had an instinct that told him they could be about to behave as such just the same. When Terry shut the door and locked it, pocketing the key, Shard saw something hanging on the wall behind, something revealed by the closing of the door: something of rusty iron, a circular flat band with inward-pointing iron spikes along two-thirds of its length, with one end sliding into a thumb-screw. He had seen similar objects in museums, in ancient crumbling castles whose dungeons harked horribly back to the Dark Ages. It was big enough to belt a man’s waist — or a woman’s, when required. It could, he supposed, accurately be called a talking-piece.

  *

  Back in York, Larger was looking anxious, pulling at his chin and staring into the living-room’s gas fire. Ethel remarked on his preoccupation.

  “Worrying about Pearson?” she asked.

  “Well — I don’t know really. Yes, I suppose I am. It’s my responsibility, you know.”

  Ethel, sewing a button-hole, bit off cotton. “Nothing’s likely to go wrong, dear.”

  “I don’t know so much. There was a bloke, a tramp …”

  “Oh?”

  Larger explained. “Saw him again this afternoon as a matter of fact — this evening, after the car’d left. Standing and staring at the window. Funny — or could be.”

  “Why,” his wife asked, “didn’t you go out and talk to him?”

  “Don’t know why not,” Larger said irritably. Then he added, “Yes, I do. I was thinking of having a word when the law come along and chivvied him away. I didn’t want to have any barney with the law, did I?”

  Ethel bit more cotton and went off at a tangent. “You take your tablets, did you?”

  “Eh?”

  “Tablets, dear —”

  “Yes!” Silence: things nagged at Larger. He grew restless. After a while he banged out his pipe in a heavy brass ashtray and stood up. “I’ll go and see a pal of mine,” he said.

  “About your tramp?”

  Larger nodded.

  “Never find him, will you? They all look alike.”

  “They don’t all pick their noses,” Larger said in an aggrieved tone, “and he was tall with it. You never know … they tend to congregate in dosshouses. This friend of mine, you don’t know him, Ethel, he picks things up what other people don’t. Worth a shot in the dark … just to put me mind to rest like.”

  He went out.

  Seven

  The man called Terry indicated the chair and said, “Sit.” Shard sat. There was little daylight left now; the other man, Nigel, flicked on a light, then crossed to the barred window and yanked heavy shutters across, securing them with a metal rod.

  Shard asked, “What’s the idea?”

  “Questions,” Terry said. “I thought I told you — you’re here for the grill.”

  Shard shrugged. “So you did. Start grilling.”

  “You don’t object?”

  “Why should I? I’d expect you to satisfy yourselves, just like any other prospective employer.”

  Terry smiled, a smile that failed to warm the cold eyes. Those eyes were fishlike, small and pink-rimmed, and the face had an unhealthy pallor. He and his companion remained standing, with their backs to the door now. The guns were not out, but were handy in shoulder holsters. Shard knew the interrogation would be tough — that was to be expected, but there was a hard, almost feline quality in Terry’s face, the callousness of the homosexual in certain situations of power, that gave Shard an extra awareness of danger. “We’ll start at the beginning,” Terry said, staring at Shard, arms folded across a thin body as he lay back against the door. “Where and when born, names of parents, occupation of father, names of schools.”

  Christ, Shard thought, but kept his face blank. This, he had not expected: it could be bluff, but if they should check it out, and they had the time to do just that, then it was all going to fall apart. In the meantime, the question hung in the air, very bad game indeed. There was only one thing to do, and
Shard did it: names apart, he told the truth: this had the advantage that he wouldn’t, at least, trip over his own tongue. The information was absorbed into a tape recorder produced by Nigel. The questions proceeded towards Shard’s career in the army: he gave the answers he had already passed to Hedge. He was closely questioned about Belfast; this was easy, since he had once worked on a job in Northern Ireland in co-operation with the military authorities and the RUC. His political views and alignments were sought and digested into the tape. He had views but no positive alignments: the views he gave were naturally phoney, tailored to fit requirements. He could only hope they would withstand the further check, that Hedge had pulled his finger out and used his imagination as to whom he primed. The army led to civil life and Pentonville and the GBH that had put him there, and Shard kept his story straight, repeating what he had already told Larger back in York. Shard had done well — he knew that: the eyes had grown friendlier in the two searching faces, the horrible instrument hanging from its hook on the wall began to lose its immediacy. But it all depended on the check: basically, it was a simple question of time.

  The questions became technical: what did ex-Staff-Sergeant Pearson know of the handling of explosives?

  “Enough.”

  “To handle safely and intelligently … what?”

  “Dynamite, TNT, jelly … you name it, I’ve met it.”

  Once again, glances were exchanged, a look this time of faint amusement. “This is bigger, boyo! This is nuclear.”

  *

  Casually said: Shard had caught his breath. Casey had said it was to be big; but there were degrees of bigness and Shard had never imagined this, though, knowing it now, he saw the logic. It was a known fact that some at least of the various terrorist organisations had gained access to things nuclear; the first of Heathrow’s military encirclements some while ago had been due to knowledge that some ground-to-air missiles had passed into the wrong hands.

  He had failed to conceal shock.

  “Surprised, eh?”

  “You might say so. Look, what’s in the air? Can I ask that now?”

  Terry shook his head. “Not yet. There’ll come a time when you’ll have to be told. For now, patience.” He paused, eyes searching Shard’s face again. “Can you handle nuclear explosive?”

  “I think,” Shard said, glad and sorry at the same time for divers reasons, “that I’ll have to say — no. That is, I’ve absorbed some of the theory … and I’m familiar with nuclear warheads in missiles … that sort of thing. I’ve no experience of rendering safe or anything like that. That didn’t come into the day’s work … not when I was in Belfast.”

  Terry rubbed at his chin. “That won’t matter, not really. It’s basic experience of siting explosives that we need, siting them where they’re wanted in spite of … difficulties. And seeing to it that they give their full potential — you know, proper tamping and that, packing ’em down hard so they don’t waste their force on the fresh air. I’m talking as a non-professional, but you’ll know what I mean.”

  Shard nodded. “Yes, I know what you mean. You don’t want me actually to prepare the charges?”

  “No. They’re prepared already, no worries there.”

  *

  A camp bed was brought in and Shard was left alone behind the lock and the bolts and the bars. Outside, a rising wind whistled over the fells and soon Shard heard the patter of rain blown against the window outside the shutter. As the wind increased, even the thick walls of the old farmhouse seemed to shake: the rusty iron device on the stone vibrated, at least in Shard’s imagination, as though preparing its wicked teeth to bite human flesh … Shard gave an involuntary shiver, thinking of the further check that had no doubt already started: on the way in he had seen the telephone wires, the skeletonic line of poles bringing communication along beside the muddy track from the main A684 to the village of Stalling Busk, lost in the rain and mists of the Pennines. What was to happen to London? London had just six days left — his watch said one thirty-three and the date was April 28th — six days to an appalling subterranean tragedy if the date remained unaltered: and he had a feeling that this was so. His questioner, growing talkative after a meal and a thermos of coffee, had confirmed Tom Casey’s death as being nothing directly to do with the job in hand: Casey, it seemed, was not known to have been in contact with Shard. Shard chalked up a credit for himself: Casey’s death had indeed been a crime passionel. According to these men, the woman in the top job, still no names mentioned, had given Shard’s predecessor his opportunity and it had been taken: the woman’s lover had been unhappy.

  “Hence me?” Shard, all innocence, had asked.

  “Hence you. Take the tip, boyo!”

  “Lay off, h’m?”

  “Right off. She’s sexy but bespoke — or kind of.” Terry didn’t go into the details of how revenge had been exacted: Shard was glad not to suffer a repeat — he’d seen Tom Casey, the sewn lips holding in what should never have been there, and the horrible gape between the thighs. At least he was not currently in the presence of the killer, but might yet meet him face to face, and could only trust to the self-discipline instilled by his police training. Before leaving him alone in his bare prison-bedroom, Terry had said they would be heading for HQ before the light was up, but someone else had to show first. That someone might well be Nadia Nazarrazeen, Shard fancied — or, if not, she would be at HQ.

  Not long now.

  *

  A time-bomb named Larger had walked the streets of York a little earlier, directed out through Monk Bar by the knowing pal he had been to see. He found the wooden cellar-cover set in the pavement, banged, climbed the adjacent stone steps, and banged again, this time on the door of the tall, decrepit house. After a while the door was opened up.

  A ragged man looked out. “Yer?”

  “Looking for someone,” Larger said. “I’m told he’s here.”

  “’Oo?”

  “Bloke they call Nose.”

  “Oh, yer, Nose.”

  “Know him, do you?”

  “Oh, yer, I know Nose.”

  Larger shone a torch past the ragged man. The torch beamed into the hall, showed filth and cobwebs, met the stink on its way out to turn Larger’s stomach. Larger brought out a handkerchief and held it to his face, tried not to breathe in. “Here — is he?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Larger grew belligerent. “Told he was … I said, didn’t I? Look —”

  “Yer, ’e was. That’s right.” There was a movement of a tattered arm and of fingers, and a revolting sound. The fingers blocked one nostril, the other was cleared by a mighty gale. Larger shifted sideways.

  “Do you bloody mind?”

  “Pardon. ’E’s gone. Nose.”

  “Christ. Where?”

  The ragged man shrugged. “Dunno. Took off late this afternoon. If asked like, I’d say ’e went south. Talked a lot about the south ’e did, London and the south.” The man sniffed, nostril nicely clear. “Warmer like. Mind, ’e’ll take it in stages.”

  “First stop where?”

  “Depends … depends which way ’e’s going, don’t it? Could be anywhere, just anywhere.”

  “Give me some addresses,” Larger said. “Up to what … ten miles out of York, all round.” The ragged man obliged; Larger made notes in biro. He enquired about recent arrivals: there had been too many for the ragged man’s recollection of personal details but, and this for sure, there had been none with what you might call respectable clothes. Cursing, Larger beat an angry retreat. The smallest risk was unacceptable and the bosses would crucify him if he had erred, if he had been less than thorough … therefore, though the whole of this might well prove to be an unnecessary expenditure of time, he must find Nose somehow.

  *

  The key turned in the lock and the bolts were withdrawn. Shard, woken already by the sound, however stealthy, of a vehicle drawing into the lee of the farmyard wall, sat up in the camp bed. A voice, before the light went o
n, said, “Wakey, wakey. Four a.m., time to move out. Breakfast on the move.” Terry. The light went on; Shard, stubbly himself again, stared at more stubble. From behind Terry’s hair and jeans, came something on the air: pervasive, heady, sexy perfume — the top woman? The scent seemed somehow to fit the name, Nadia Nazarrazeen, nationality uncertain as yet, intentions diabolic.

  He lifted an eyebrow and tapped a finger against his nose: the response was a nod. The words, however, were workaday ones: “Get dressed. Make it fast.”

  Shard obeyed, pulling on shirt and trousers over his pants. No washing water — he hated facing any day feeling scummy and ex-bed. He thought of home, of Beth — wondered when the DC’s funeral was to be and how Hedge would manage to fix that. There would be eventual involvements with two sets of ecclesiastical authorities if that poor DC had happened to be a Roman Catholic like Tom Casey … and in the meantime the woman spreading stimulation outside his room was at least morally responsible in his book for too many killings already of innocents, both British and Irish. Shard, dressed, went out of the room and there she was, very Arab, immensely striking, immensely beautiful, had to be Nadia Nazarrazeen but still no names spoken so Shard had to be immensely careful …