Skinner's festival

70

Skinner felt Maggie Rose jump slightly beside him, in involuntary alarm, as the first firework. launched from the wide area around the foot of the Castle rock, exploded in synchronicity with the first bars of Aaron Copland's 'Outdoor' overture.

'Get used to it, Maggie. Keep looking around, and keep your fingers crossed that's all you'll see or hear.'

For some while it seemed as if Skinner's hope against hope would be fulfilled.

As the Concert unfolded, the unamplified music boomed up towards them on their battlement. Different shapes, colours and patterns of light burst all around them, as the pyrotechnics lit the night sky, in uncanny harmony with the music.

Skinner concentrated his view to the left, and Rose kept hers to the right. From time to time, flashes from the fireworks were channelled through the night-glasses and blinded them, but as the hour's duration of the concert wore on, they were able, between them, to keep under observation the whole of the area surrounding the Gardens and the theatre. They could see nothing untoward, only the enthusiastic crowds down in the Street, as they jumped and clapped with each new wonder of light in the dark sky.

At last, the programme reached its climax, Handel's Musicor the Royal Fireworks.

'They're nearly at the end now,' Skinner called out above the noise to his two companions. 'So far, so-'

He was cut short by the sound of an explosion, carrying clearly through a lull in the music, and a momentary break in the fireworks. It came from their left.

Skinner swept his glasses along Princes Street to the Caledonian Hotel, but saw nothing untoward. Carrying on, he scanned along Castle Terrace. Saltire Court and the Traverse Theatre seemed undisturbed, and from what he could see of the Usher Hall and we Sheraton, they too looked undamaged. But beyond them, beyond the Royal Lyceum, in Lothian Road, to the left of the high top of Capital House, he saw a billowing cloud of smoke and dust rising and shining in the floodlights which illuminated the front of the building which had been home to the Film Festival.

His radio was in his hand in a second. 'Major incident, Filmhouse,' he barked into the open line. 'All emergency services required now. Every second officer in Princes Street go to the scene, immediately.'

Just as he finished issuing the order, he heard the tail-end of a second blast, this time sounding from the right.

Again Skinner swung round, searching through the glasses, but something took him instinctively to the Balmoral. The hotel's foyer was out of his line of sight, but his eye was caught at once by the shattered windows in its side. Then he saw the smoke of the; bomb as it spread outwards in a mushroom from the front of the huge, square stone building.

'Jesus Christ, there's been another.'

The radio mike was in his hand once more. 'Second explosion, Balmoral Hotel. Emergency services respond again. Headquarters, let's get every policeman in Edinburgh into this area!'

He was still issuing his orders when Maggie Rose grabbed his arm. 'Sir, what's that over there, on the Mound?'

He followed her finger pointing into the night, until his glasses found the stationary lorry. It was big and flat-backed, and it seemed to have been pulled right up on to the pavement, just at the point where the curving section of the Mound straightened to run down towards Princes Street, past the National Gallery. The lorry's cab was empty, but its curtain side, facing the Gardens, had been pulled open, and four figures stood on its platform.

Skinner could see them clearly – and could see clearly what they were doing.

Two of them clasped bulky, box-like objects to their shoulders, while the others were braced against them, to hold them steady.

'Andy!' he roared into the radio. 'Get them into the car, now, they've got missiles! In the car! In the car! In the car!'

And as he spoke he saw the launchers fire, simultaneously. He followed the path of the squat fly-by-wire projectiles as each homed in on its target.

'Down! Down! Everybody down.' He screamed into the radio, and into the darkness of the Garden Theatre.