Falling More Slowly

by Peter Helton

  The boy’s bed was by the window in a room with two other male patients who were either asleep, unconscious or dead, it was hard to tell. Joel Kerswill’s mother was there, on a hard chair at the bedside. It was clear she had cried recently and since cheered up again at the excellent prognosis. The curtain separating the Kerswills from the bed next to them was drawn but the front curtain was open.

  The boy was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He was sitting propped up against the big hospital cushions with a fierce expression of disapproval on his pale face. His right eye was covered with a white dressing. There were scratches and pock marks on his cheek and forehead where flying splinters had hit, all scabbing over now.

  IDs at the ready. ‘I’m Inspector McLusky, this is DS Austin.’

  Mrs Kerswill was in her mid-thirties. She wore a grey and blue track suit and trainers. Her dark hair had been subjected to a utilitarian cut that she imagined allowed her to forget about it. She clutched car keys and mobile in one hand and a packet of cigarettes and lighter in the other. ‘He could have been killed! It’s a miracle he hasn’t been killed! He could have lost an eye, or both. My son could be blind now, d’you realize that? Just from walking along minding his own business. First London, then Glasgow, now here. I mean, London, fair enough, but you’d never expect them to do it here, would you? Not in a park either. Do you have a lead yet? Do you know who did this to him?’

  ‘The inquiry is well under way.’ Platitudes. He turned to the son. What was his name again? ‘How are you feeling, son?’

  ‘I’m not your son. It hurts and I want to go home, okay?’

  ‘Joel! No need to be rude to the man.’ She turned an apologetic face to McLusky. ‘They want to keep him in until tomorrow. As a precaution, they said.’

  ‘Joel, do you feel up to answering a few questions?’

  ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘Well, for instance, did you notice anyone near the place just before the explosion?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Did you notice anyone near the shelter just before the bomb went off?’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t pay any attention, though. Didn’t expect there to be a bomb, did I?’

  ‘And you were walking past? In which direction?’ Joel’s injuries seemed to be on the right side so he presumed the boy had been walking along the path towards town.

  Joel Kerswill confirmed it. ‘I was walking towards Park Street.’

  ‘Why were you there?’

  ‘To look at it. I’d just got back from the Parks Department. I went for an interview.’

  ‘For …’

  ‘Apprenticeship. Gardening. Working in the nurseries and that. At Blaise Castle.’

  ‘Did you get in?’ Austin asked.

  ‘Don’t know yet. I think I deserve to though.’ Joel’s antagonism seemed to melt a little.

  ‘Because of what happened?’ McLusky asked.

  ‘Yeah, don’t you think? I nearly died there. Well, I could have, if I’d sat down for a bit close to where the bomb was. I’d be well dead if I’d sat down. I don’t think they should give it to someone else, it wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘I should think so, too. But to come back to the moments before the explosion. You said you didn’t see anyone. Was anyone running? Riding a bicycle?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. There was some guy on a motorized skateboard who overtook me? Maybe a minute before? But I didn’t see him near that pavilion thing that blew up. Unless he chucked a hand grenade or something.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll leave it there then but we might need to talk to you again if anything new turns up. Someone will come and take a written statement for you to sign but perhaps later at home, when you’re feeling better.’

  ‘I feel all right, I could go home now.’

  ‘He wants to play on his computer.’ Mrs Kerswill smiled and was rewarded with an embarrassed scowl by her son. ‘His father walked out on us, perhaps the useless sod will get in touch if he reads about this in the paper. A photographer took Joel’s picture for the Post.’ Her son’s scowl deepened. Why did she have to tell everyone? ‘He owes us a fortune in maintenance. And Child Support, in case you were about to ask, are bloody useless. If you ever come across him you can give him a message from me. Right where it hurts.’

  McLusky promised to keep them informed and left. Just before they gained the corridor Austin nudged his arm and nodded in the direction of the nearest bed. The middle-aged patient in it, propped up in a sitting position, was staring straight ahead, oblivious, under a sign warning Nil by mouth. His skin was a cardboard shade of grey.

  Once in the corridor McLusky pointed back at the room. ‘Wasn’t that …?’

  ‘Mr Spranger.’

  ‘I didn’t recognize him without his bulldozer.’

  ‘Wonder what he’s here for.’

  ‘Nothing trivial, one hopes.’

  The receptionist made a phone call and sent them down to the Observation Ward. There a doctor was found who could give them news of the second victim.

  He was a young man, bright, brisk, alert, not the half-dead, asleep-on-his-feet junior doctor you were meant to expect these days if you believed the papers. ‘She still hasn’t regained consciousness though all her vital signs are strong. We’re a bit baffled by this but for the time being we’re just monitoring the situation. She’s suffered two perforated eardrums, though miraculously hardly any shrapnel damage. From what I’ve been told she was on her way home when the blast knocked her off her feet. Have you any idea as to the kind of explosion? A bomb in the park, said the news … Who’d put a bomb in a place like that?’

  McLusky nodded his agreement. ‘That’s a damn good question. It’s early days yet. What kind of a person is Miss, Mrs … Howe?’

  ‘Ms Howe is a retired postmistress.’ The Ms, McLusky noticed, fell naturally from the doctor’s lips, while he himself could never pronounce Ms without putting undue stress on it.

  ‘Bit young to be retired? How old would you say she was?’

  ‘She’s forty-nine. Unemployed postmistress, then. It’s the same thing. Post offices are closing and they’re not coming back. From what her sister told us she hasn’t been unemployed long but didn’t expect to find another job. Not at her age.’

  ‘You just mentioned a sister …’

  ‘We found identification among Ms Howe’s possessions and traced the sister through the hospital records. On a previous visit to the hospital she had named her as next of kin. She’s with her now.’

  ‘Do you think we could talk to her?’

  ‘That’s up to her. I can ask her. Wait here.’

  It turned out that Ms Howe’s sister had stepped out for a breath of fresh air, which in her case involved a packet of Superkings and a persistent little cough she didn’t know she had. They found her by the nearest entrance. She looked to be the older sister, with hair the colour of concrete and the deep crags of a lifetime’s smoking around her mouth. McLusky joined her and gratefully lit a cigarette himself. When he suggested her sister might have been the intended victim Mrs Henley scoffed at the idea. ‘That’s ridiculous. Who would want to kill my sister? Her? And with a bomb?’

  ‘Your sister isn’t married, does she have a partner?’

  She shook her head. ‘Liz finds it quite a lonely life since the post office closed. Turns out that was where she got most of her social contact. She lives by herself on Jacob’s Wells Road. She’d have been coming from the shops, she always comes up through the park. She probably sat down on one of those benches, we did it once when I went with her. Liz’d be dead for sure if she’d still been sitting there but I was told she had moved on already.’

  ‘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 you
r 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.