by Peter Helton
McLusky flicked his cigarette into the lawn where it died with a hiss. ‘Let’s get out of here, we’re no longer needed.’ As if in confirmation a uniformed sergeant strutted on to the lawn and started asking questions and dispensing orders in all directions. Mopping up time.
Austin found a likely victim amongst the constables securing the scene. ‘Ah, Hanham, glad I found you. You can give us a lift to the station. Our transport is … temporarily out of action.’
‘Temporarily, sir?’ Hanham looked back at the battlefield and the crumpled lump of the Skoda. He’d seen the result of the stunt the new DI had pulled. What a nutter.
Austin shrugged. ‘Yeah well, the build quality isn’t what it was, they make ’em from tinfoil now.’
McLusky pulled his soiled shirt away from his torso for a better look. ‘Drove well though — I’m thinking of buying one myself. I need to change into fresh clothes.’ He let himself fall on to the rear seat and spoke to the tidily barbered back of the constable’s head. ‘Drive us to Northmoor Street first, will you?’
‘Sure.’ Hanham stole a glance at his senior passenger in his mirror. Typical CID. Not a care in the world. The new DI just destroyed a nearly-new car and now he was worried about a stain on his shirt. If muggins here got as much as a dent in the bodywork of this car he’d never hear the end of it, he’d be spending forever filling in forms. If he wrote it off he’d consider his career more or less finished. CID. They lived on another planet altogether. No one had ever suggested to him that he might make detective one day. He’d stay in uniform forever. And between now and retirement there’d be plenty of chances of dying in it, too.
‘Find yourself a parking space, the inspector won’t be long, I’m sure.’ Austin stood in Northmoor Street holding the door on the little panda car, letting his superior get out.
McLusky hesitated on the pavement. He needed another shower but didn’t want to leave Austin waiting in the car. Only his place was a shambles. Hanham would be accustomed to being abused this way and probably thought him a prat anyway. He could send them away and walk back to the station but it looked like rain again. What the hell. He’d never keep up the pretence that he led a normal life. ‘Here.’ He fished a crumpled banknote from his pocket.
Austin touched one finger to an imaginary cap in salute. ‘A tip, sir? That’s very kind, am I to share with the driver?’
‘Get us all a coffee from Rossi’s and bring ours up, I’ll leave the doors open, first floor. D’you mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Ask them to put them in real cups, I can’t stand polystyrene. Tell them we’re honest cops and we’ll return them.’
Upstairs he stripped off his clothes and threw them into the corner with the rest of the stuff that was heading for the launderette. He opened his spacious wardrobe and rummaged for a clean pair of trousers. All he turned up was a pair of jeans, slightly frayed at the hem. He found a nearly ironed shirt that would have to do.
The gas from the boiler caught with a bark but he was prepared for it this time. The water didn’t seem to mix properly and somehow managed to feel hot and cold at the same time. Plaster dust and grit sluiced from his hair, he could feel it travel down his back. DS Austin seemed all right. Straightforward, didn’t ask unnecessary questions and had a sense of humour. Most CID humour consisted of schoolkid pranks and bad jokes which could get tiring after a while but Austin didn’t seem the type.
The towel was still damp from his earlier shower and refused to dry him properly. Normal people, real grown-ups, probably always had a stack of freshly laundered fluffy bath towels in the airing cupboard. He was still waiting for the day when he’d wake to find he was grown up and mature, the way others seemed to manage so effortlessly, and discover that he had an airing cupboard.
‘Room service, hello.’
‘Take it into the kitchen, won’t be a sec.’
He dressed quickly. A blow-dryer would come in handy, too, now that his hair was getting quite long. It was already beginning to recede a bit and keeping it longer hid that well.
‘Real cups, as ordered.’ Austin handed back the banknote. ‘And it appears they take a warrant card.’
‘You didn’t ask for it, though.’ McLusky spoke sharply. He disapproved of police officers who solicited free stuff from civilians. Accepting an offer was sometimes the judicious thing to do, asking for it definitely wasn’t.
‘’Course not.’ Austin dismissed it. ‘Quite … minimalist in here. In a cluttered kind of way.’
While they leant against the kitchen counter and drank their cappuccinos McLusky quizzed Austin some more about the area. Downstairs Constable Hanham poured his coffee into the gutter. He hated the stuff but of course no one had thought to ask him what he actually wanted. A simple cup of decent Earl Grey tea is what he would have said, though he doubted you could get such a thing in a foreign shop like that.
Ten minutes later McLusky once more climbed into the back of the patrol car. He hated being driven so much that he could never stop himself from working imaginary brake pedals, which was why he felt it was safer to keep his feet out of sight in the back. Hanham drove off in the opposite direction to the one he himself would have chosen.
The constable knew that the long way round often saved time. McLusky made careful mental notes, taking everything in like a camera as Austin continued to point out the landmarks, Queen’s Road, the Triangle, Browns. Sitting behind Hanham McLusky peered right up a side street and glimpsed a dirty mushroom of smoke growing skywards from among the trees. Half a second later the sound wave of an explosion hit the car like a roll of thunder.
‘What the fuck?’ Hanham flicked on Blues and Twos and cut across traffic, raced up the narrow street. ‘It’s in Brandon Hill, this side of the tower.’ He drove as far as he could towards the park, then braked sharply. All three officers bailed out of the vehicle and ran along the paths, then uphill across the grass towards the source of the explosion. The plume of smoke now had a ball of fire in its centre, licking twenty foot high towards a stand of trees. People were shouting. Hanham on his radio was breathlessly calling for back-up, ambulance and fire brigade even before they all came to a panting halt at the scene.
A boy and a middle-aged woman were lying on the path that wound around the rise. A wooden structure blazed on the other side of it, halfway up the hill crowned by Cabot’s Tower. Debris of the explosion was everywhere. Several people were sitting or standing, nursing cuts and splinters, dazed with shock. Small children were screaming throughout the park, scared by the sudden noise. McLusky noticed different reactions among the people in the park. The cautious were moving away, distressed, or dialling on their mobiles. Others were shouting, rushing towards the scene from all over the park. Some came intending to help, most stopped at a distance they deemed safe, watching. An elderly woman sat hyperventilating on the grass. The teenage boy was wailing, hands clutched to his face, blood dripping from between his fingers. Several civilians were tending to him. The shockwave seemed to have set off every car alarm in the neighbourhood. Hanham ran back to the patrol car for the first aid kit. McLusky knelt by the second prone victim. The woman lay motionless among debris and supermarket shopping on the path. Her face was grey. A little blood trickled from her right ear into the straw of her hair. She looked dead. He pulled off her scarf and felt around for a pulse. It took him a while to detect it. It felt weak to him but despite his job he didn’t consider himself to be an expert in vital signs. He thought of putting her in the recovery position but didn’t like the look of the bleeding ear. What if her skull was fractured?
‘Is she alive?’
He looked up at Austin. ‘Barely, I think.’ He felt helpless, useless, but pushed the feeling back, swallowing it down. ‘What the hell happened here? What was that thing that blew up there?’ He gestured with his head at the smoking fire at the centre of the devastation. He was a stranger in town again, he had no idea what this place ought to look like.
‘Eh? Eh
m, it was just some sort of rustic shelter with benches all round. Kids use it for snogging and cider drinking. Tramps sleep in it sometimes. Uniform move them on.’
‘So it was just … wooden? I mean, I can see it was, but there was nothing else to it, nothing in it that could blow up like that? It’s one hell of a blaze. Can you smell petrol?’
Austin nodded grimly. ‘Yeah, that’s not a simple wood fire. But it was just a big wooden shelter on a concrete base. Nothing else to it.’
‘It was a bomb then. Must have been.’ A thin mist of rain began to fall. He looked around him. Constable Hanham was trying to help the howling boy but couldn’t persuade him to move his hands off his face. Austin was circling the burning jumble of timber, shooing away some kids. A young woman had appeared next to McLusky, bending down to the victim. ‘I’m a nurse.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact way, as though unaffected by what had happened, and proceeded to check that the woman’s airways were clear, and covered her body with her coat.
That’s what I should have done, McLusky thought, I’m useless. He could hear the first sirens over the screeching and warbling of the car alarms. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered. People were taking photographs; some had camcorders, every other person appeared to be snapping away on mobiles. He pulled out his own and began to do the same, taking a 360 degree shot of the scene of destruction, confusion, anxiety, curiosity. Where was the bloody ambulance? The first to arrive were a couple of patrol cars at the bottom of the hill. They parked some way off on the grass, knowing that fire and ambulance had to come through soon. Thinking ahead, professional. Next to arrive were the fire engines. By now there wasn’t much of a fire to put out; the drizzle had increased, keeping the flames down.
A constable pointed a fireman in his direction.
‘You in charge here?’
‘For the time being. I’m DI McLusky.’
‘I’m Barrett, senior fire officer.’ He stood next to McLusky and watched his officers deal swiftly and efficiently with the incident, looking after the victims, damping down what was left of the fire. ‘CID? You got here quickly. We usually get to incidents long before you lot. You’d send Uniform to scout first, surely?’
‘We were passing, heard the explosion. It was quite a bang. I’m no expert but I suspect it doesn’t take much to blow up a wooden shelter. Someone made very sure it would go up properly. We could feel the shockwave. Some people got blown over standing twenty yards away.’
‘My guess is some kind of accelerant was used, too. There was no warning?’ There was suspicion in the man’s voice. ‘You weren’t here because you got a call …?’
‘Nothing like that. My DS would have mentioned something if things were likely to go bang in this town.’ My DS. He indicated Austin who was locked in an argument with a tourist about relinquishing the memory card of his camera to him so they could examine the images on it. Camcorder man didn’t look happy. ‘I think I’d have been made aware of any bomb threats, even though it’s my first day here.’
‘I know.’
McLusky widened his eyes at him.
‘It might be your first day but you do keep busy, DI McLusky. You attended the Nunnery Lane incident earlier but then disappeared before I could talk to you. The house will have to be pulled down, by the way. Let us have your report on that as soon as you can. It’s certainly a weird one.’
‘Is it?’ McLusky didn’t think so. People used the weapons that came to hand. If they had sticks they’d use sticks, if you gave them guns they’d use guns. He thought he understood the appeal of a wheeled digger. He squinted with worry into the worsening rain. It would take some creative writing to show that he had made best use of the equipment by stuffing the Skoda under the digger.
‘You formed any opinions as to who and why yet, inspector? Terrorism? Here?’
‘Strange target for a terrorist. When did they take to blowing up park benches?’
‘What then, vandals?’
‘Don’t know yet. But I intend to find out.’
At last the ambulances arrived, fifteen minutes after Hanham had made the call, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Both the boy and the unconscious woman were stretchered off and driven away very soon with Blues and Twos. Those with minor injuries were being assessed by paramedics on the grass opposite the smouldering remains of the shelter. Most injuries came down to splinters and bruises where wooden debris had thumped into bodies. In the end only two more casualties, both suffering from shock, were sent up to the Royal Infirmary. The hyperventilating woman recovered enough to be collected by a relative in a taxi.
Austin arrived by McLusky’s side, holding several memory cards he had requisitioned from cameras and mobiles, and nodded at the large grey Ford coming to a halt behind the collection of emergency vehicles at the bottom of the hill. ‘Super’s here.’
The arrival of Superintendent Denkhaus electrified the constable guarding that end of the road. Denkhaus walked straight at him and at the police tape as though neither existed. The constable lifted the tape high over the man’s head and the burly policeman walked through without acknowledgement. He was aiming at him, McLusky noticed, but the superintendent’s face gave nothing away. After what Austin had said earlier he hoped the man wasn’t on a diet.
Denkhaus pointed a fleshy digit as he approached and stopped just short of poking his new DI in the chest with it. ‘DI McLusky, you had an appointment with me at nine o’clock this morning.’ His voice boomed loud enough for several uniforms to turn their heads.
‘I know, I’m sorry, sir, something urgent came up.’ He put on what he thought of as his reasonable face.
‘I heard all about it. You’d be surprised how quickly news of the complete annihilation of police property travels on this force. You chose to intervene in what was clearly not a CID matter even though you had business elsewhere. With me. Next time I ask you to my office, and I think that might happen very, very soon, you’ll make it a priority and will get there on time. Clear?’
‘Very clear, sir.’
‘I bloody well hope so. So what the fuck happened here?’
Chapter Two
Inside the cramped Mercedes command unit parked in Charlotte Street Superintendent Denkhaus doled out tasks to the team in a practised stream, much of it devoid of punctuation. Then he slowed to add a few more thoughts. ‘Colin Keale, most of you will remember, planted three pipe bombs behind the Magistrates’ two years ago and got twelve months suspended because of his medical history. I sent Uniform round there to pick him up and see if he’s up to his old tricks again. In the absence of DCI Gaunt, DI McLusky, who most of you will have met by now, will be in charge of this investigation. That’s all.’ He looked around the familiar faces in the room, several of which allowed their surprise to show. Like DS Sorbie: sharp, smart and dark; DI Kat Fairfield: immaculate, eager and self-possessed. DS Sorbie was fiercely chewing his biro while watching DI Fairfield for a reaction to the news that the new man was in charge. Kat Fairfield was looking straight ahead, rigid with anger, avoiding all eye contact. ‘Carry on, then. DI McLusky? A word.’
McLusky followed his superior outside. Denkhaus pointed a fat finger straight at his chest, lightly tapping his tie. ‘It’s your investigation for several reasons. A, because you somehow managed to be first on the scene. B, because I like to shake things up and C, because it’ll give you a chance to jump in at the deep end. You won’t have to run after anybody, they’ll all come to you. You’ll not make many friends but then I’m not running a social club. And there’ll be a lot of questions, none of which you can answer since you only just got here. My theory is that by the end of it you’ll know the answers and feel right at home. Of course there’s always the possibility that you’ll completely louse it up in which case I’ll make your sojourn in the city a short one. You might not be in charge for long, of course. You know how it is, not that this looks much like a terrorist bomb, but anything goes bang and CAT will immediately want to take over. I’m expecting
a visit from them soon and I want to be able to show them that we’re not a band of yokels waiting to be rescued by the Combined Anti-Terrorism bunch. Colin Keale went before the magistrate for drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest etc. and got a fine. He took exception to this and built some pipe bombs which he set off behind the courts. They weren’t really meant to harm anyone, just meant to express his displeasure with one hell of a bang. He’s got mental problems, that boy. In a way I hope it’s not him, because that would mean his illness just progressed. We’ll see. What’s your first impression, anyway?’
‘Hard to say, sir. It was quite a blast but an unlikely target for even the weirdest terror group. We might be looking for local lads here.’
‘Let’s hope so. I agree it’s a strange place to plant a bomb. But then bombers are weird by definition, which makes them so dangerous.’ He checked his improbably thin wristwatch. ‘I’ll be going to lunch now after which I will be in my office.’
‘There’s only one thing, sir …’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t have any transport at the moment.’
Denkhaus’s nostrils flared. ‘Then get a space hopper or something, I fear we’re fresh out of Skodas! And you can also stop using my uniformed officers as chauffeurs, they’re needed for more important things than driving young DIs around town.’ A passing constable smiled grimly. Too right.
Despite the extended side pods — the van’s ‘hamster pouches’ — the office of the Mercedes command unit was small for all the bodies crammed inside it. When McLusky went back in a few heads remained studiously down while some of the detectives studied the new man with open curiosity.
He stood in front of the whiteboard. Austin had spent some time bringing him up to speed with the current caseload they were battling. It was quite insane but average for a city this size. He hoped he could strike the right note. ‘Okay, I’ll make this short. There’s always a chance that Mr Keale of past pipe-bomb fame is responsible, but let’s not pin our hopes on it. We do however want a quick result on this and we’re stretched, with lots of Uniform tied up doing fingertip searches of the park. There’s also the matter, I’ve been told, of hunting a roving gang of mobile phone muggers that appears to be high on the super’s list of priorities.’