Angel Hunt

by Mike Ripley

  They were almost across the room when she met the coffee table with the back of her knees and went over backwards herself. The table collapsed under her weight and the back of her head hit the carpet with a dull thud. Springsteen rode her fall and then bounced loose up in the air, landing about an inch from Lara’s face. That showed at least that his reactions weren’t totally shot. Most cats at that point would have dived for cover. Springsteen stayed where he landed, looked down at Lara’s face with precision rather than malice and flicked out his right front paw. It had always been his best punch. Three parallel sets of claw marks appeared on her right cheek, about half an inch apart. Then she screamed.

  I think Springsteen was more surprised by that than by anything else that had happened so far. He leapt sideways and began to look for escape routes.

  I stepped into the room and slammed the door just as Springsteen was about to dive through my legs. I grabbed him and hugged him to my chest more to immobilise his claws than out of affection. His tail, fluffed up to four times its normal size, swished at my thighs, and just to show he wasn’t pleased, he playfully bit my gloved thumb.

  Lara sat upright and touched her cheek. She was still in silent scream mode, mouth wide open and nostrils flared, and she was looking at her hands in disbelief.

  It wasn’t the few small droplets of blood, little more than specks, that worried her, it was hair. Springsteen’s winter coat, quite luxuriant at its best, was prone to moulting, and the relatively mild winter we were having in London hadn’t helped.

  She rubbed her hands down the front of her sweatshirt, and that just made things worse. Then I realised she wasn’t trying to scream, she was trying to breathe. And then she started shaking. She was having a panic attack trying to avoid an allergy attack.

  I took a step towards her and said, ‘Hello again.’

  She shuffled backwards, still in a sitting position, kicking at the wreckage of the coffee table as if it were somehow restraining her.

  I took two more steps, and she went back further until her spine hit the wall near the bedroom door. She flung out her arms, and her fingers scrabbled at the paintwork. I heard a nail break.

  ‘Where’s Armstrong, Lara?’ I said slowly.

  She wasn’t looking at me; she hadn’t looked at me at all. Her gaze was fixed on Springsteen.

  Then her breath came in long, ragged wheezes almost as if she was trying to blow bubbles in her throat. It sounded awful, and each heave of her chest made her upper torso quiver. She sneezed then, and the effort racked her more.

  ‘Where did you leave the cab, Lara?’ I asked again, moving to sit on the edge of an armchair within five feet of her. A few hours before, I would have settled on five miles being the safest distance between us.

  She sneezed again, then wheezed. The bubbling sound was giving way to a dry rasping noise that seemed to fascinate Springsteen. He stopped kicking against me and turned his head to look at her. She turned her head away quickly as if trying to sink into the wall, but her eyes flashed back immediately.

  I edged forward as if offering Springsteen to her.

  ‘Don’t want to make friends?’

  ‘Get ... it ... away …’ she gasped, then sneezed twice. Her legs, splayed out in front of her, were quivering now.

  ‘Where did you leave the cab, Lara? Just tell me and I’ll take him away.’

  ‘Aaa …. aaa … Abberton … St … str …’

  Abberton Street? Christ, I’d just driven past that.

  ‘Abberton Street? The one round the corner?’

  She nodded, and the air rattled in her throat. It was like watching somebody drown, without the water.

  ‘Does Professor Bamforth live there? Professor Brian Bamforth?’

  Another nod. Springsteen said ‘Yeeeow,’ and that brought two more nods in rapid succession. The sound of her breathing filled the room.

  ‘Is it a timing device, Lara?’

  Nothing.

  I stood up and took a step towards her, holding Springsteen in front of me.

  ‘Yesssss,’ she hissed.

  ‘Set for midnight?’

  She nodded. If she’d been planning for New Year’s Eve, it would have been midnight, and she probably didn’t know enough to mess around with a timer.

  I started to back off, and then I noticed a plastic shoulder-bag in the chair I’d been leaning against.

  Holding Springsteen with one arm, I opened the bag’s clasp and tipped its contents into the chair. Among the usual female detritus were her inhaler and a plastic tub of pills with one of those child-proof locks only children can open without swearing. The pharmacist’s label on the pills said ‘12 hour protection per dosage’. She’d told me that morning – was it only that morning? – that she’d taken her drugs. Luckily for me, she hadn’t thought a top-up dose necessary.

  ‘Keys, Lara. What did you do with the keys for the cab?’

  ‘D … d … dr … drain …’

  ‘You dropped them down a drain?’

  Nod.

  ‘Okay. I’m going now,’ I said, putting both inhaler and the pills in my jacket pocket.

  She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she could.

  I left her sitting against the wall, face turned into it, arms outstretched, fingernails clawing gently at the paintwork. A martyr crucified by the one weakness she couldn’t overcome with sheer willpower.

  There was no way of locking the flat door from the outside, so I grabbed Springsteen’s basket and hurried to the lift. My foot didn’t seem to hurt at all any more. Springsteen even went back into his basket without a struggle.

  I was on a roll. Things were going my way.

  As the lift doors opened, I realised I’d forgotten the walking stick. The hell with it. I took my two reserve benzedrines instead and hobbled out of the building and across the road towards Abberton Street still crunching them.

  I thought about what else it said on Lara’s bottle of pills: the small fact that the prescription had been made out for a Miss L Bamforth. And I wondered what had happened to make someone so angry, as Geoffrey Bell would have understood. Angry enough to blow up her own father.

  But that was her business and I didn’t think of her again, because then I was in Abberton Street and there was Armstrong parked 50 yards away outside an unpretentious, snug, middle-class detached house. And that was my business.

  The street was deserted apart from parked cars. Most of the houses still had lights on downstairs, including the one Armstrong was outside. People staying up late watching the television or playing idiot board games that then get put away for another year.

  I left Springsteen’s basket inside the front gate of the first house, where he would be protected by a concrete gatepost should anything go wrong.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered to him, ‘nothing will go wrong.’

  He turned around inside the basket and showed me his tail. It was a good thing I wasn’t looking for volunteers.

  There was a street light across the road from Armstrong, which allowed enough light for me to see inside him. I walked – limped – all the way round him, peering in the windows, but there was nothing untoward at all. It had to be in the boot. That’s where I’d have put it. Near the fuel tank.

  I went down on my knees behind the rear nearside wheel and felt around in the mud and rust and muck until I located the magnetic pad I’d welded there. Still attached, despite our cross-country ramble with the hunters, was Armstrong’s emergency key.

  I looked at my watch. Eleven minutes to midnight. No sirens, no robot half-tracks, no helicopters hovering overhead with searchlights. Where the hell was the Bomb Squad when you needed them?

  I slipped the key into the boot and carefully twisted the handle, lowering the boot flap as if I was taking a soufflé out of an oven.

  There’s not that much room
in a black cab’s boot, because the spare wheel stands there in the middle. So that’s where she’d put it.

  Actually, the bomb itself was in an old red biscuit tin with the words ‘Chocolate Assorted’ printed across the lid in yellow letters each decorated with little sprigs of holly. It had been jammed half behind the spare tyre and held in place by black insulating tape. Inside the spare wheel frame itself was the detonator: a cheap travelling alarm clock with the back removed, taped to a square of hardboard. Two thin, red wires led to a small alternator and a 2.5 volt battery taped next to it. From that, two thicker wires, each with a jack plug like you’d find on a stereo speaker, ran to the biscuit tin and disappeared into two holes punched crudely in the side.

  The clock had its gold alarm arm fixed straight up on 12. Its timer arms said it was ten to, but could you ever rely on those things?

  I reached out both hands and gently eased the jack plugs from the tin. The ends were covered in grey, putty-like stuff. It was only a smear on each, but for all I knew it was maybe enough to set things going. I let the leads dangle over the edge of the boot and set about the battery, cursing my gloves, but not wanting to take them off. The idea of touching the thing was to me what touching Springsteen had been to Lara.

  I eased back the thin metal flap that held it in place at the bottom until I was sure it wouldn’t give a connection, then I peeled back the insulating tape until it fell out and rattled into the rim of the spare wheel with a loud clang. Or at least it seemed loud. I realised I had forgotten to breathe recently.

  I ripped the damned thing free then and carried the clock part in one hand and the battery and leads in the other into the short driveway of Professor Bamforth’s house. I put them down a good yard apart on the gravel and then went back for the biscuit tin.

  I laid that down another yard away from the other bits and thought about ringing the doorbell. In the distance, I heard the siren of a fire-engine. Let them break the news.

  Armstrong started first go, his engine still warm. I reversed down the street to where I’d left Springsteen and put the basket on the floor in the back.

  ‘They wouldn’t have made it in time, you know,’ I told him excitedly. ‘That probably makes me a hero.’

  He was asleep.

  I climbed back into the driver’s seat and put my arms around the steering-wheel, giving it a big hug of relief.

  ‘Let’s go home, kid,’ I said in my John Wayne voice, and I smiled in the dark at the two fire-engines and three police cars we passed on the way.

  ‘That’s him,’ said Lisabeth, pointing an accusing finger. The Gestapo officers pushed by her to get at me and drag me from my hiding place.

  Well, it wasn’t quite like that, but it was close.

  My hiding-place was under the duvet, stretched across my bed where I’d fallen, pole-axed, when I’d got in. I had remembered to open the cat basket, because it was there in the middle of the floor, its door hanging open as if Springsteen had busted his way out. Taking my clothes off, however, had been beyond me.

  Lisabeth was at the bedroom door, and behind her was a uniformed police sergeant.

  ‘That’s him,’ Lisabeth was saying.

  I struggled up to sit on the edge of the bed, and as soon as I put my right foot on the floor, it reminded me that it still hurt.

  ‘Mr Angel, is it?’ asked the policeman.

  I put my hands up to my head and realised I was still wearing gloves. Sheepishly I pulled them off.

  ‘I told you it was,’ Lisabeth said indignantly, looking up at him.

  ‘Er … quite. Looks as if you were having a good time last night, sir,’ he said.

  He was looking at the bottles of Bailey’s and tequila that were rolling around the bedroom floor. I think I must have had some idea about a celebration when I got Springsteen back home, but somehow I hadn’t quite made it.

  ‘Yes, great party,’ I said cheerfully, ‘You should’ve been there, Lisabeth, you’d have loved the …’

  From the stairs came the sound of a struggle followed by what I knew instantly was the Christmas tree in the hall crashing over again.

  Then a shrill female voice.

  ‘That’s him! Let me get at the bastard!’

  Stephie.

  ‘We didn’t forget anything when we were out last night, did we, sir?’ asked the sergeant politely.

  The hospital X-rays found three small broken bones in my foot, and they splashed a partial plaster on it and told me to stay off my feet for a week or two. The cuts and bumps on my head didn’t deserve stitching and they couldn’t find any internal damage. What really hurt was they didn’t believe I’d done it falling down stairs.

  Still, it got me out of organising the house New Year’s Eve party, apart from a few administrative phone calls, and Lisabeth and Fenella – and even Miranda – took to their new roles as nurses with relish. There was one sticky moment when I had to explain what I’d meant when Lisabeth overheard me telling Fenella I could get her a nurse’s uniform, but I blagged my way through.

  A whole procession of friends turned up to see me, and I held court from an armchair with my right foot on a pile of cushions, playing it for all it was worth.

  Prentice turned up and spent a morning filling me in.

  Stephie had done her bit, yelling and screaming and threatening to hold her breath until she went blue if the police didn’t come. Then, when she’d heard the sirens, she’d thought of what her father might say if she got involved in whatever was going down, so she’d gone into panic.

  I’d left the keys in the Flying Fenman and so, being a gutsy girl, she’d started it up and found first gear. The only problem was, she couldn’t find any of the others. Steering wasn’t her strong point either. She’d turned left to get away from the sirens and found herself in a cul-de-sac.

  And there she stayed until morning.

  ‘She climbed into the back of the van and made herself comfortable and put her head down for a few hours,’ said Prentice. ‘Then she struck up a very interesting relationship with a passing milkman and he gave her a lift on his milk-float to the nearest police station.’

  ‘I wonder what she was doing so far from home?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘Funnily enough, that’s what her father said when we rang him. Well, that was the gist of it. There was an awful lot of other stuff he said as well.’

  I’ll bet.

  ‘So what actually happened the other night?’ I tried casually, but he wasn’t taken in for a minute.

  ‘It looks – looks – as if certain members of Action Against Animal Abuse were trying to assemble a bomb from six pounds of Semtex H outside the home of Professor Brian Bamforth, when for some reason they were disturbed. There was an anonymous tip-off and officers from the Metropolitan Police, along with fellow officers from the Bomb Squad and the London Fire Brigade, were able to arrive in time to prevent any damage to life or property.’

  Huh! Thanks a bunch!

  ‘Acting on other information received, a certain Miss Lucy Bamforth –’ Lucy? I wondered if she’d changed it deliberately to get in with the Reverend Bell. Two Lucys in his life would have been too much – ‘otherwise known as Lara Preston, was apprehended and, after medical treatment for a respiratory condition, was questioned by police.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  He held up a thumb and forefinger made into a circle.

  ‘Zilch. Didn’t even want a solicitor. The Reverend Geoffrey Bell, however, was questioned and arrested yesterday by Cambridge police. He admitted to the illegal possession of military property, to whit, high explosives. The forensic boys have already found traces from where they hid it. In a coal bunker, if you must know.’

  I raised an eyebrow but pretended it was all going over my head.

  ‘He won’t, of course, say how he got them, but it’s clear they came via one
Peter Bamforth, alias Peter Preston, a former army officer and brother of the better-known Lucy-stroke-Lara.’

  ‘How did you find him?’ I asked wide-eyed, trying to suppress a grin.

  ‘We had him all the time,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘He was in Wormwood Scrubs. He was arrested following a disturbance outside a fur shop in Wigmore Street just before Christmas.’ Prentice allowed himself a smile. ‘He was wearing a rabbit costume when he was nicked.’

  ‘He wasn’t carrying a sledgehammer as well, was he?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

  ‘Yes,’ Prentice answered, his eyes narrowing. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Shot in the dark,’ I said dismissively. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Justice takes its natural course,’ he said airily.

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘We screw the lid down tight to make sure it doesn’t make the papers. Well, think about it. Bamforth the mad professor about to take his seat on loads of scientific committees, having signed the Official Secrets Act in triplicate. His loony children – their mother died, by the way, and he’s remarried – go animal-activist and try and kill him. One of them an ex-army officer pinching munitions, the other a martial arts expert who was Young Secretary of the Year a while back. All that and furry animals in nasty experiments – Christ, can’t you just imagine what the newspapers would do to it?’

  ‘And don’t forget the muscular Christianity element: Karate Kick Vicar in Bomb Plot Horror.’

  Prentice put a hand to his brow as if testing for fever.

  ‘Don’t. Not even in jest. I had his bishop on the phone yesterday. Really pissed off about having his Christmas interrupted he was, too. Still, the Military Plod want to talk to the Reverend Bell; I won’t have to.’

  ‘So how much do you reckon I’ll get from the papers for my story, then?’