Falling More Slowly

Chapter Four

‘You don’t really think he planted the bench bomb, do you? Anyway he couldn’t have, he’s on holiday.’ Colin Keale’s upstairs neighbour was a fleshy forty-year-old man with sparse hair and a moist voice. He reluctantly handed over the spare key Keale had left with him so he could water his house plants. ‘He would hardly have left me the key to his flat if he had a bomb factory down there.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’ McLusky took the key off him and thought that he probably meant it.

‘Unless you think I’m involved in the bomb plot too, inspector.’ He sounded hopeful, relishing the thought. ‘I know all about Colin’s bit of silliness with the pipe bombs but he wasn’t very well at the time. I assure you he’s completely normal now. He’d never do anything like it again.’

‘We just need to eliminate him from our inquiries, that’s all.’

Colin Keale lived in a small basement flat on Jacob’s Wells Road, not five minutes’ walk from the site of the explosion. If he did plant the bomb then it would seem the height of laziness to do it within hearing distance. Or perhaps it gave the act an added frisson. But surely the ultimate satisfaction must be to watch it happen.

Austin barred the neighbour’s way on the steps. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to stay up here.’

‘What, are you afraid I might interfere with the evidence, or something?’

Austin ignored him and followed the inspector down the cast-iron steps into the basement forecourt.

A fig tree in a half-barrel sent fleshy leaves up to the sun and other plants in pots thrived inexplicably in this deeply shadowed sinkhole. McLusky gave the half-barrel an exploratory kick. It felt and sounded solid enough. Next he flicked open the letter box and peered through. The narrow hall looked dark and crowded with jackets hanging from the wall. There was nothing on the floor as far as he could make out. He rang the bell and immediately afterwards inserted the key and opened the front door.

The place smelled faintly of chip shop curry sauce. To the right a door led into a small sitting room; electric heater in a blocked-up fireplace, sofa, stereo, TV and potted plants, lots of them. Everything was tidy. The kitchen was a narrow galley made even darker than necessary by the fact that several house plants crowded around the tiny window. The bathroom was a windowless and plantless hole but the bedroom was a jungle. There was a narrow bed and a couple of chests of drawers. Plants stood on every surface, a big palm grew in a large pot on the carpetless floor. All this vegetation stretched yearning shoots towards the ungenerous basement window. McLusky ran a latex-gloved finger across the front of a bookshelf and harvested a worm of dust. Next he ran a thumb over a polished yucca spike — not a speck of dust. There were books, mainly on the care of house plants. He turned to Austin. ‘Go get the neighbour, will you, whatsisname …?’

‘Tilley.’

Mr Tilley appeared pleased to be asked at last. ‘Satisfied, inspector? No bomb factory here.’

‘What does Colin Keale do, fork-lift driver?’

Austin confirmed it. ‘That’s what it says in his file.’

He turned to Tilley. ‘Where?’

‘Supermarket depot. He does mainly night shifts. It suits him, he doesn’t have to talk to anyone, just gets orders over the radio and picks stuff up and dumps it on the ramp. That’s his job, that’s all he does. That and growing house plants. Look.’ He indicated a low table near the window. It held a plastic propagator full of tiny pots and trays. Above it hung a grow lamp. ‘He propagates potted plants. Not pot plants. He’s as straight as you and me, inspector.’

Speak for yourself, thought McLusky. ‘When’s he due back?’ He knew already but wanted to hear it from Tilley.

‘This weekend.’

‘Who’d he go with?’ He continued to open drawers without really searching the place.

‘By himself. He’s not overly sociable but he’s no longer the nutter he was a couple of years ago. Colin takes his medication and he stays off the booze, mainly.’

‘Mainly?’

‘Everyone needs a drink from time to time, you know?’

Too right. He squeezed into the kitchen, opened cupboards, cutlery drawer, oven. This didn’t ring any alarm bells at all, he was wasting his time. ‘And what does Colin Keale drink when he does need a drink?’

‘Scotch, I think. I saw a bottle once, but it’s no longer a regular thing, really.’

‘Any particular brand?’

‘I couldn’t say. Glensomething. There’s so many of them. What does that have to do with anything?’

‘Nothing, just idle speculation. Thank you, Mr Tilley.’ He handed him the key. ‘Can we leave you to lock up?’

Back on the pavement he shrugged. ‘Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there but it doesn’t feel right.’

Austin didn’t like the implication. He had been taught to mistrust his feelings and go with the facts. He hoped McLusky wasn’t talking about instinct. Next thing you knew he’d be saying he’d got a hunch. Hunches didn’t go down well in twenty-first-century policing. ‘Could be under the floorboards.’

‘I know, but it ain’t. Maybe it’s the potted plants. Anyone who blows up stuff is obsessed with something, a grudge, an ideology, an idea, a fantasy of some kind. But not Care and Propagation of House Plants, Volume 2, surely? Send someone round the supermarket depot, see if he has a locker there where stuff could be hidden. Though I doubt it very much.’

‘Okay. But we’ll still pick him up when he gets back?’

‘Oh yes. The moment he steps off the plane, Jane.’

Maxine Bendick dashed through the drizzle to her Mini, fumbled with her seatbelt, started the engine and checked her watch. She had twelve minutes to get across to Park Street for her fitness training. It was an idiotic rush to squeeze the lesson into her lunch break at the best of times but when, as it had today, something came up just before she was due to leave, like a client having a lengthy rant about his council tax bill, not that it had anything to do with her, then she would be late for sure. It was only a half-hour slot anyway but the only one that had been available and nothing was going to stop her. The insane traffic might, of course. She felt vaguely guilty for driving such a short distance — from the ‘council services access point’ where she worked to the car park behind the Council House — but she would never manage it in time on foot lugging her gear. Getting from her reserved parking space to the Council House car park wasn’t the real problem either, she was getting good at that. Only finding a space when she got there could sometimes be tricky, even if there weren’t bombs going off. It was a week since the bomb blast. She hoped the police had finished examining the area or it would take her even longer to get to the gym.

Traffic didn’t seem as bad today, moving at a steady snail’s pace. She was even lucky with a parking space and found one close to the exit. This made all the difference. If her parking space was at the ‘good’ end she would take the long way to the gym, cutting through Brandon Hill. It was a longer walk but it was worth it, reminding her that there was life beyond houses and housing. Her new Mini bleeped and blinked as its central locking engaged and Maxine walked off at a brisk pace. The drizzle was turning to rain but she didn’t mind. A glint caught her eye. Something square and shiny was lying on the tarmac close to the exit of the car park. It looked like a powder compact. A young couple were walking towards it. Surely they would claim it? A little girl’s voice inside her shouted No, I saw it first! then the couple had walked past it without noticing. Maxine quickly stooped and picked it up. It was indeed a gold compact. It was quite clean and unscratched, so couldn’t have been lying there long. Not real gold, probably, the metal was a bit too pale for that, though it was satisfyingly heavy. Maxine slipped it into her jacket pocket. There was no time to look at it now. She shrugged her sports bag higher on to her shoulder and hurried towards the park.

‘I was always crap at chemistry.’ McLusky had spoken out loud in the privacy of his empty office though he would happily have admitted it in company. He didn’t understand half of what the report said. He turned to the end of each section and read through the conclusions. More jargon. The Forensic Science Service at Chepstow had worked fast, had worked miracles, in fact. Getting at least some of the evidence from the locus of the blast analysed within a week was lightning speed compared to normal procedure and had only been accomplished with considerable pressure from the ACC.

Usually there was nothing too complicated about these reports but this time he had no idea what firm conclusions he should draw from the make-up of the device.

Joel Kerswill had given a written statement that offered them nothing more than another description of the skateboarder. Elizabeth Howe, the second victim, had abruptly regained consciousness two days after the explosion. Spookily, it had been at the exact hour of the blast, as though she had heard an echo that had at last awoken her. If so, then it had certainly been a mental echo; she had two perforated eardrums. They’d finally been allowed to talk to her yesterday. The interview had been conducted entirely in writing, to spare Ms Howe’s ears. The prognosis for recovery was good.

She remembered sitting on the bench to rest before continuing to carry her meagre shopping home. The next thing she remembered was being lifted up, like in a dream. She couldn’t actually remember hearing the explosion.

No new clues about people or events, nothing about the bomb itself. Not one witness had noticed a container under any of the benches.

This much he did understand from the FSS report: the metal container that had held the explosive device — a tin in which Glenfiddich whisky was sold — had also contained an amount of petrol. The device had been triggered with the help of a simple timer constructed from a Russian-made mechanical wristwatch and a run-of-the-mill three-volt battery. The rest of the report was so much gobbledegook. Very precise gobbledegook, naturally. The FSS prided itself on it, which meant their reports were littered with provisos, approximations and qualifications — probably no smaller than but not exceeding.

In other words, what he wanted was an interpreter. He stuck his head round the door of the CID room. ‘Jane, the university?’

Austin looked up from a pile of painful paperwork and pointed a plastic biro over his shoulder. ‘Yes, Liam. Big thing up the hill, can’t miss it.’

‘I take it they have a chemistry department?’

‘I should think so.’

‘Good. I need help with bomb-making.’

‘Aha. So what did you make of the forensic report?’

‘Oh, I think I’ve cracked it.’ He pulled a face he hoped expressed cheerful disgust and walked off down the corridor.

DS Sorbie was muttering to himself from behind his desk. ‘Cracked yourself.’ The new boy was swanning around the city running after one single crank who let off a firecracker while the rest of them worked on ten case files at the same time and drowned in paperwork and stupid initiatives. The runaway ten-year-old boy had at least been found, albeit half-dead after what looked like a hit and run on the A road leading to the motorway. There’d been more muggings by the scooter-riding muggers. An attempted abduction of a young woman near the harbour and the never-ending string of drug-fuelled burglaries. Perhaps McLusky would do them all a favour and get himself run over again, then normal service could resume. And maybe then they might promote someone around here rather than import inspectors from outside.

McLusky turned off Park Street into the university hinterland and amused himself by trying to rip the exhaust off the Polo by bouncing it over the ambitious speed humps. After much cruising about he found a parking space at hikable distance from the chemistry teaching laboratories and started marching towards them while dialling the number Tony Hayes at the front desk had found for him. He was put through to the science department and talked to three different people until he found someone who might be able to help him.

‘And is there anybody I could talk to today, perhaps?’

‘I’ll try Dr Rennie for you, see if she’s in.’ Dr Rennie was and might fit the inspector in sometime late afternoon. ‘You’re here already? Hang on, inspector, I’ll ask her again …’

McLusky ghosted through empty, brightly lit corridors until he found the right place.

‘Do you always make appointments this way? You must have a lot of wasted journeys.’

‘Surprisingly few, actually.’

Dr Rennie didn’t offer to shake hands as she held open the glass door of the laboratory to him. Under her open lab coat she was wearing a slate-grey knee-length skirt and an ash-grey roll-neck top. She knew how to throw intimidating glances over fashionably narrow spectacles. ‘Sit down, inspector.’ She indicated a chair at a desk that faced the glass wall separating lab and corridor. Not a private room of study but one where results were shared, discussed, analysed. The place didn’t smell of anything much. McLusky could even make out a faint trace of the doctor’s dark perfume. There was only one other person in the airy room, a thin, prematurely balding man endlessly ferrying trays of small containers from long white desks in this room into a windowless store room on the far side of the teaching laboratory. McLusky thought he detected a faint asthmatic wheeze each time he walked past.

‘What is it you need help with?’

McLusky handed over the slim file he had brought. ‘I got this report from Forensics in Chepstow. What I want to know is — ’

She interrupted his flow with a shake of her head. ‘Let me read it first, then ask your questions. That way I can read it without bias.’

She really was a scientist then. ‘Sure, doc.’

Dr Louise Rennie made herself more comfortable in her chair and started reading. Every time she turned a page she also returned imaginary strands of her fine blonde hair behind her ears with an unconscious gesture of one hand which made him believe that her severely short haircut was a recent development. There was a fan humming somewhere and the wheezy lab rat clinked and padded to and fro, eyeing them with irritation at each passing. Yet it was quiet enough in the room for him to hear the swish of her tights when she crossed, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. He noticed her skirt riding up a few inches above her knee and she noticed him noticing and sighed. She was a very fast reader. ‘Yes, that’s all quite straightforward.’

‘Well, I’m sure it is, really.’ Rennie probably thought he was an idiot for not understanding it but he hadn’t touched a chemistry book since school, and even then reluctantly. ‘I was wondering though if you, as a chemist and being local and … being a chemist, if you could tell me …’ He was making a hash of this for some reason. ‘Tell me what you think. What kind of person would use those chemicals to build a bomb like that? How easy would it be? That sort of thing.’

‘That sort of thing.’ She gave him a quick smile. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

‘Yes please.’ It was the blueness of her eyes, he decided. Same blue as Laura’s. Laura, who had had enough. Who had dumped him while he was in hospital recovering from having been run over in the line of duty. Laura, for whom ‘getting himself run over’ had been the last straw. As soon as he’d been definitely recovering, as soon as she heard him try the first feeble joke about getting a job as a sleeping policeman, she had decided it was safe to go. Police officers needed police officers’ wives, she’d told him, and sorry but she knew she would never make one of those.

‘Okay, then concentrate, inspector. Potassium nitrate, sulphur, charcoal, surely you must remember that much from school?’

‘I was rubbish at science.’

‘History, then.’

‘What’s potassium — ’ he lent across to read — ‘nitrate?’

‘Potassium nitrate is saltpetre.’ She prompted her slow pupil. ‘Saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal …’

‘Oh, that’s gunpowder.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Good old black powder, inspector.’

‘So we’re not talking fertilizer bomb, plastic explosives or dynamite.’

‘We’re talking cannon, musket, firecracker, rocket. It says here that it was pure, industrial grade, so wasn’t home-made from stuff you scrape off a urinal wall and mix with barbecue charcoal, though that can be done if you have enough chaps peeing long enough against a wall. Can’t say I’d fancy that route either.’

‘So unless it’s someone licensed to fire historical weapons that require gunpowder then this is someone who bought a lot of fireworks, took them apart and then filled his container with the gunpowder? So it could be kids, after all.’

‘Kids with a bit of pocket money, yes. That amount of gunpowder would require quite a few fireworks.’

‘But probably not enough to arouse suspicion if you bought them over a period of time or at different outlets. Enough to kill …’ McLusky knew this already but was thinking aloud now.

‘Oh, certainly. Anyone too close could have been killed by the shrapnel or burnt to a frazzle when the petrol in the container caught. It’s just as it said in the paper, it was a miracle no one died.’

‘Burnt to a frazzle, is that a scientific term?’

‘Absolutely. And an apt description of what would have happened had someone been sitting on the bench under which the device exploded.’

‘Though if you wanted to make sure to kill and maim lots of people you would stuff the thing with nails etc.’

‘Yes. My guess is this was designed to make a big bang and look spectacular.’

‘It certainly did that, it sent up a huge black cloud.’ A smoke signal. ‘Could still just be vandalism then.’

‘Yet whoever did it clearly didn’t care that people might get killed, maimed and burnt or they wouldn’t have left it where they did.’

‘Yes. The technical police term for those is arseholes.’

‘The psychology department is in a different building, inspector.’ Dr Rennie pushed the report towards him.

McLusky rolled it up like a newspaper, then patted his pockets for a card. ‘I was going to leave you my card but I haven’t had time to get any printed yet. I’m new in town.’ He spotted a cube of notepaper on the desk and pulled it towards himself, then found a pen in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a heavy brushed-steel biro he didn’t remember buying. Nice, though. ‘I’ll leave you my numbers.’ He scribbled down office and mobile numbers, hoping he’d got them right.

‘What are you leaving them for, inspector?’

McLusky had no idea. He shrugged. ‘Just in case.’

‘I see.’ She rose, the interview terminated.

He thanked her, nodded at the lab rat, who ignored him, and left.

Once outside again it took him a moment to remember where he had left the Polo. Mallzheimer’s they called it now when you couldn’t remember where you’d parked your car. Fortunately his stood out by dint of being old, ugly and a shade of white no manufacturer had used for twenty years. He wondered just how this piece of junk had survived to be a police vehicle in the twenty-first century. He turned on his airwave radio and it sprang to life with urgent calls. McLusky answered it and everything changed.

Maxine Bendick dried herself quickly, pulled her shower cap off and shook her hair loose. She had it cut shorter when she joined the gym so as to save even more time. After checking her watch she dressed in front of her locker. It might be a bit of madness but taking the thirty-minute lunchtime slot changed her working day completely. On the days when she trained, lunch breaks were something to look forward to, and not just because it meant a change from the tedium of pacifying irate tax payers on the phone. For years she had spent depressing lunch breaks walking to the Metro Market, cramming a plastic container with as much pasta salad in mayonnaisy gunk as would fit, then eating it with a plastic fork, sitting on the tiny green near her office in good weather but, this being England, for much of the year at her desk. Now she had the frisson of the dash across town, the mad rush to get changed and what usually amounted to no more than twenty minutes of training with Pat. Even though it hardly progressed beyond the warm-up it left her invigorated and helped her survive the afternoon. Pat stood for Patricia but Maxine had been quite happy to let her colleagues believe it stood for Patrick and that he was handsome. She had no idea what had brought on the fitness craze, she had no weight to lose, in fact had put on weight as she built up muscle, and didn’t know anyone else at the gym. It had just grabbed her imagination one day and she’d got hooked. Going to the gym meant eating a home-made sandwich in the car while she was driving and less time to chat with colleagues but it was worth it. Even here she didn’t have time to make friends at this pace. She’d seen all four other girls that were in this changing room before but never had enough time to do more than smile and nod at them while she rushed. She crammed the gear into her holdall, pulled on her jacket and slammed the locker. As she hoisted the bag over her shoulder she could feel the hard object in her jacket pocket. She pulled it out. Why she had picked it up when she never used face powder or any make-up for that matter was beyond her. Probably because it was shiny and it meant getting something for free. Perhaps she should offer it to one of the girls. She prised the lid open.

The crack of the explosion and the blue, searing flash were simultaneous. Had she not been blinded and distracted by the agonizing pain of her nose being burnt away by a tongue of flame, she’d have noticed the first third of her left thumb fly off and thud into the open locker of one of the girls. All she knew was that her face was on fire. She didn’t know that she was screaming, she thought it was the others. Running blindly in the direction of the showers she collided with the door frame and fell to the ground. She clutched at the unbelievable pain in her face. It felt sticky.

‘Oh God, oh my God.’

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Her face just blew up.’

‘Someone call an ambulance.’ Someone was screaming it into the darkness. Or perhaps she was just thinking it. ‘Someone call a fucking ambulance!’

Then there was nothing, just the hammering rhythm of blood in the dark.

The constable in the viz jacket bravely stepped in front of his car, signalling him to stop. McLusky wound the handle and the window dropped in a series of jerks.

‘You can’t come through here, you need to — ’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He cut him off by showing his warrant card.

The PC stepped back a little in order to fully admire the state of the ancient Polo and tilted his head so he could read the inscription on the bonnet. Could the ID be a fake?

‘Never mind the car, it’s the hard-boiled eggs that are getting me down.’ He left him standing there, one constable who was sure to recognize him in future.

The dreaded thing had happened. Not only had the bomber struck again but only a few hundred yards from the first explosion. There was a message in that he didn’t want to hear. It was a message about who owned the place. At the moment it sure as hell wasn’t him.

The corner of Park Street and Great George Street was busy. The ambulance had already left but the rest of the circus was there. The private little gym had been evacuated and some of its members hung about outside to watch the police machine at work. The entire area was being searched for more devices. He was directed down a corridor past an empty cafeteria. Lanky Constable Pym was standing guard outside the ladies’ changing room further along. On one of the benches in the corridor a female officer was comforting a young woman in a dressing gown. Two more young women stood nearby, looking pale.

All McLusky had to do was follow the voices, the police voices, so different from those of civilians — purposeful, using the vocabulary of incident, procedure, of cover-your-back and make-doubly-sure. In the dressing room he found Austin giving instructions to a young police photographer. ‘Get shots of every particle of the exploded device in situ, get the CSI techies to show you where they all are. Hello, inspector, they managed to find you then?’

‘My mobile needs charging.’ He didn’t mention that he had forgotten to turn on his personal radio until he left the university. He sniffed the air. This place smelled of calamity, of singed hair, roasted flesh, burnt fingernails, gunpowder and sweat, the sweat of fear mingling with that of work and concentration. Blood-spurts covered lockers and benches. There was a pool of vomit on the floor. ‘Tell me what happened, Jane.’

Austin talked fluently about the facts so far established. ‘The victim is a Maxine Bendick. Late twenties. She comes here for fitness training in her lunch break, works with a personal trainer, Patricia Maine, who’s out in the lobby right now giving a statement, but she wasn’t in this room when it happened. She was already talking to her next client. There were four women using the changing room when it happened. According to one girl — ’ he consulted his notebook — ‘a Tamara Tasker, Bendick had changed back into street clothes and was about to leave but stopped and took out a gold powder compact which appeared to blow up in her hand.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘One of her fingers …’ Austin pointed at an open locker containing blood-spattered clothes.

‘Thumb.’ A white-suited technician furnished them with the detail without looking up from his task of scraping something unsavoury off the wall next to the locker. ‘Left hand.’

Austin continued. ‘There you have it. Left thumb. Landed in there.’

McLusky took a good look. It looked like pain, a great deal of pain. ‘Other injuries?’

‘Her face. Apparently her face is badly burnt. The same witness said her face was actually on fire. Yes. Extensive burns to her face and hands.’

‘But she’ll live?’

‘I think so, the injuries aren’t life-threatening per se, unless she dies of shock, of course. Ambulance got here quite quickly for once. Did you know our ambulance service is on the bottom of the league tab — ’

‘Spare me statistics and league tables, Jane, wherever possible.’

One of the CSI technicians piped up. ‘You’re not a football supporter then, inspector? Nor a betting man.’

‘Got it in one.’ It was almost obligatory in the force to like football. He had even tried supporting Southampton for a while just to fit in, but had found it mind-numbing. It seemed a long time ago now when he had still tried to fit in.

The girl would live. But would she want to live once she saw what was left of her face? ‘So. Someone fills her powder compact with Semtex? What’s going on here, d’you think?’

‘Search me.’

‘Where’s the rest of her stuff?’

‘Her bag is over here.’

The pink and white sports bag was sitting on a bench by the door. Austin talked to the nearest technician. ‘You finished with it?’

‘We haven’t touched it. If you must open it wear gloves.’

McLusky wriggled his fingers at him, already clad in latex.

‘All right, then. But it could also be booby-trapped of course.’

‘Rubbish. The compact blew up after she had changed so she’ll have packed this herself. But by all means stand well back, everyone.’ A spray pattern of blood adorned the top and left side of the bag. Tight whorls of ashen residue looked like the worm-shaped remains of charred hair. McLusky unzipped the bag in one quick movement and rummaged about. Apart from towel and leotard he found a grey Tupperware box. He noticed his DS instinctively lean back as he prised off the lid. The box contained a home-made sandwich, cut into two chunky rectangles. McLusky approved. ‘No revelations here.’ He closed the Tupperware box. The aroma of cheese and tomato faded, filling him with regret.

Austin continued his report. ‘She was on her lunch break. According to her coach she works for the council at a so-called access point in Hotwells. Inquiries, advice, that sort of thing.’

McLusky recognized the senior CSI man with the blond moustache from the first bomb site and approached him. ‘Do you feel like saying something rash, like whether the two explosions are in any way connected?’

The man’s moustache twitched. ‘Impossible to say, inspector. At this stage. But the sizes of the explosions are very different. This was a very compact design, so to speak.’ There were groans from his colleagues. ‘This was made to hurt a single person. Almost certainly victim-activated.’

‘Victim-activ …’ The language of these people. ‘You mean it was meant to go off when someone handled it?’

‘Precisely. The other bomb had a timer. This one could have sat unexploded for years. Until someone opened it, probably, or shook it. Hard to say at the moment. Forensics might be able to tell us more.’

He thanked the man. By now his stomach was rumbling audibly, a result not of revulsion at the awful smell in the room but of hunger, victim-activated by sniffing Maxine Bendick’s uneaten sandwich. He gave Austin a push on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Statements were still being taken in the foyer. They walked straight past and stepped outside. The usual crowd of onlookers had gathered beyond the police tape, including the press who started firing cameras and questions at them as soon as they walked up Great George Street where the police units were parked.

‘Inspector, is the victim still alive?’

‘Are the two incidents connected?’

‘Is it the work of the same bomber?’

‘What’s the motive behind the bombings?’

‘Was there any warning?’

‘Is this part of a campaign?’

‘Have you made any progress on the first bomb?’

McLusky ignored the press and walked on. ‘You’ve got some of the questions right there.’ At least they seemed to have stopped pushing the Al Qaeda angle. Denkhaus had devoted his press conference to stamping out the rumours of terrorism. The city had a sizable Muslim community and everyone was aware of the racial tensions already at work.

McLusky spoke to the nearest uniform. It was Constable Hanham. ‘Couldn’t you have cordoned off the area beyond the vehicles? Press and public are swarming all over the place.’

Hanham was in defiant mood. ‘Yes sir, only we ran out of tape and we don’t have enough bodies to keep them further back.’

He surveyed the straggly line of police tape strung from a car to a drainpipe to another car. ‘Then close off the entire street, that’ll only take half the tape, and string what’s left across the road up there. Move them right back.’

‘Sir, there’s people wanting to get to their cars they parked further up.’

‘Well, they’ll have to walk round then. Do them good.’ Naturally McLusky himself avoided any kind of exercise on the grounds that police work was enough foot slog to begin with. He walked on with Austin beside him. ‘But there are plenty of other questions. Like how the hell did she end up with an exploding powder compact, for one. And who wants to blow her to kingdom come would be good to know too. If this area is covered by CCTV then we’ll examine the footage of course.’

‘There’s CCTV in the foyer and the gym but obviously none in the dressing rooms.’

‘Right. It’ll all be a complete waste of time since she could have had the compact for ages, but it’s got to be done. I’ll even look at it myself, don’t worry.’ A pale-faced young DC, who he had earlier seen taking statements in the lobby, came out of the front door of the gym. ‘Who’s that walking question mark?’

‘That’s DC Dearlove.’

‘Good lord.’

Austin wasn’t sure if the inspector was referring to Daniel Dearlove’s name or looks. Dearlove had bad posture and mousy hair so thin and clogged with hair gel that his pink scalp showed through everywhere. His wispy moustache clung to a narrow pink lip. He looked like a kid dressed up by his mum in a hand-me-down suit.

‘Call him over, will you?’

‘Hey, Deedee.’

Dearlove looked up from his notebook, changed direction but continued reading as he walked. His lips were moving.

‘By the way, Deedee’s polyester suits generate enough static electricity to charge your mobile with.’

‘Genius.’

Dearlove looked up from his notebook only when he had come to a halt in front of Austin. ‘Jane? Inspector?’

McLusky saw Dearlove’s fingers were stained with ink from a leaky biro. ‘Did you get anything of interest?’

‘Ehm, not really. The trainer said she’d never seen the victim use a powder compact, in fact she didn’t think she normally used make-up at all.’

‘She might have used the compact just for the mirror. Okay. Where was the victim taken? Royal Infirmary?’

‘No, Southmead Hospital. Burns Unit.’

‘Right. Get someone down there straight away, I want a constable outside her room round the clock. Work out a rota and see it’s adhered to. Then contact Southmead Burns Unit and tell them I want to interview Maxine Bendick at the first possible. Get both organized and get back to me.’

‘Okay, sir.’ Dearlove sighed. His shift should have finished hours ago. There was a film on TV he’d wanted to watch starting this minute and he hadn’t thought of setting the recorder. Once you joined the police force you had to record the rest of your life, just in case you weren’t there to see it. And as usual there wasn’t enough left in the budget to pay overtime, even before flashy bastards like McLusky wrote off brand new cars.

‘Right.’ McLusky had already forgotten Dearlove. ‘Let’s get everything collated and see if any of it makes sense when looked at together.’

‘Okay. We have lift-off …’ Jane walked briskly away towards his little car.

McLusky cast a weary eye over the scene. The press hung about patiently or perhaps were just resigned to boredom, hoping for developments, statements, things to photograph. Someone had found more tape by the looks of it, constables were busy fluttering the stuff in more sensible places, ordering people beyond the line. Tourists were getting extra entertainment and were making the most of the pause in the rain. Shoppers with carrier bags walked slowly by. Strangers talked to strangers.

He spotted the superintendent heaving himself out of his spotless car at the street corner and his stomach responded with a protesting growl. Danish pastry for breakfast was okay but you got hungry again after five minutes. He walked off in the opposite direction and ducked under the tape. It was the wrong colour. It also read Caution, Electric Cables Below. Someone had shown initiative.

Doubling back towards Park Street, putting distance between himself and his superior, he felt like he had when skiving from school, something he had done a lot of. But he felt no guilt. He couldn’t think too long on an empty stomach without becoming short-tempered, even absent-minded. He hoped this wouldn’t mean he’d end up in the same shape as the super, who clearly liked his food and, according to Jane, his beer.

He stopped briefly to look back towards Brandon Hill and the bomb site, now completely cleared. All that remained was the blackened concrete base on which the shelter had stood. The council had already announced that it would be rebuilt. He wondered morosely if any such announcements would be made about Maxine Bendick’s face.

Near the museum he had adopted a bistro that served tapas, a drinkable cappuccino and wine by the glass. A few tables stood empty on the uneven pavement, waiting for the arrival of spring. The waitress smiled in recognition as she handed him the menu. Would she still smile at him if she knew that he was a police officer? He ordered bread, olives, a dish with spicy sausages and something that looked like overcooked ratatouille but tasted fine. The food here, although Spanish, reminded him of Greece but was conveyed to his table with un-Mediterranean haste.

If murder and mayhem spoilt your appetite then the police force was clearly not for you. McLusky enjoyed every morsel of his food and his glass of red precisely because he had a bad feeling about these explosions. Over the past few days he had completely convinced himself that he was dealing with a one-off, whatever the target had been, whatever the motive. The second explosion changed everything. And the super had put him in charge. He raised his eyes from his empty plates and found the waitress looking at him from behind the high bar. He nodded at her, intending to ask for his bill, but when she arrived at the table found himself ordering more wine instead.

The second bomb had nothing prankish about it. It was a deeply malicious thing. This could not be misconstrued as someone wanting to create a bang. Someone had wanted to hurt Maxine Bendick. Someone had gone to considerable lengths to hurt Maxine Bendick, constructed the device, concealed it inside her compact. It took a particular kind of person to imagine the injuries the device would cause and still persist in building it, planting it. It took an extraordinary depth of feeling, like hate or the desire for revenge, on the one hand, and a complete lack of empathy on the other. The person behind this was not lashing out, here was forethought and planning. Malice aforethought. McLusky drained his glass. Two could play that game.