One Man and His Bomb (Harriet Martens Series Book 6)

by HRF Keating

  *

  It took Harriet all that afternoon, working from home while John was down in London at the inquest on Graham — something he had forbidden her even to think of attending — to assemble the sort of team Mr Brown had in mind. Not all the officers she chose were top-ranking skilled searchers. But, as she had selected them from detectives, men and women, she had worked with at various times, she felt safe in believing they were possessed of skills enough to do the job. To them, however, she added two officers she did not know well, Detective Sergeant Jones and DC Emma Hardy, specialists from the Force Searches Team.

  So, by the end of that day — each of her choices carefully interviewed — she felt, bar one other small task yet to be done, that she would be ready to go to Mr Brown the next morning to choose the moment to act.

  The one other task she had set for herself was to go and have a careful look at The Willows from outside. If, when the search team presented themselves there, Gwendoline Tritton, small box tucked beneath that knobby-buttoned jacket, made her escape at the back, the whole enterprise would fall apart.

  From the row of hooks by the garden door she took down an old mackintosh of John’s, an ancient, seldom used garment, occasionally lent out to friends caught in the rain.

  Mannish though it is, she thought as she set out into the fast-fading evening light, it’ll serve as a reasonable disguise if ferocious Miss Tritton chances to be looking out. And it may always come on to rain again.

  In the event, there was no sign of the house’s owner when Harriet went slowly walking past it along wide Pargeter Avenue. Between The Willows and its neighbours on either side, high brick walls still ensured respectable privacy in this fast-deteriorating area, the Meads. She walked on then to the next turning so as to inspect the house from the rear. Reaching the road there, one a good deal less well-kept than Pargeter Avenue, she set off again for the back of the big, old house, conscious of the creaking sound John’s stiff mack was making at her every step.

  All was tranquilly quiet, despite this plainly being a part of the area that had descended into social chaos. The cars left at the kerbsides looked even more on the edge of the scrap yard than those outside Christopher Alexander’s flat. Few of the streetlights appeared to have come on, although it must be well into lighting-up time. On the opposite pavement, beside all the usual rubbish that collects in seldom-swept streets, there lay, she saw, a large branch ripped off a fully blossoming lilac in one of the patches of front garden, relic of distant, different days.

  She looked at it for a moment, depressed at the senseless hooliganism it demonstrated. And then, as she had done often enough in the past, she told herself that the impulse to destroy was, after all, simply a sign that there were too many of the deprived, reduced to expressing their discontent in the only way they could see to do it. By destroying, or — what’s the word? — besmirching what seemed like a threat to them from the well-regulated world.

  She walked on, looking upwards into the clear sky for the line of ornate chimney stacks that marked out The Willows.

  Then, as their shapes slowly made themselves clear, in the silence of the deserted street, somewhere ahead she heard clanking footsteps. In a moment she was able to make out, in the faint light from the single streetlamp she could see, the person coming towards her, a big swaggering black man, head crowned with a yellow woolly cap. And at once, totally irrationally, she felt a tingle of menace.

  All right, she said to herself, I know plenty of black villains, many of them almost as much pussycats as poor, blubbering Winston Earl. But I was brought up, down on the South Coast, among my parents’ older friends, more or less relics of the Raj. And they instinctively feared and despised anyone with a dark skin. So, yes, if I’m not afraid, I am at least alert. The shadow of old, forgotten, haunted feelings.

  Or perhaps I’m resurrecting those because … because I want an excuse, the excuse that I’ve been somehow threatened, not to go on with this on my own. It’s the climax, or it may be the climax. And, truth to tell, deep down I may really be afraid of the outcome. Of failure. Even of success, too. Success achieved through more violence than I can handle now. Yes, old though she is, Gwendoline Tritton, is liable to turn to violence — a knife from the kitchen, a four-pronged fork from the garden — violence that may bring about death. Another unnecessary death in a world too full of them.

  She came to a halt. The high back wall of The Willows was too close to be able to spend time giving it the careful scrutiny needed before the big man approaching her came level.

  In a minute now he was all but face-to-face with her. And she saw at once that, eyes fixed on the ill-swept pavement at his feet, he was in no way a threat to anybody.

  No, poor devil, she thought as he swerved a little and passed her by, he’s probably in the depths of depression. Perhaps — the idea struck her with sudden force — he, too, has just lost a loved one.

  Graham, poor dead, blown to pieces Graham.

  Behind her the clanking footsteps slowly receded. Above, in The Willows, a solitary light came on in one of the windows.

  No, damn it, she told herself, I’m here to carry out a task. Come back, Hologram Harriet. Haul me out of this, make me get on with it.

  And it happened. Whether she was the hologram or the real Harriet, she went a few steps further until she found in the high wall a tall, narrow wrought-iron gate. Recently re-painted, she noted. No lack of money here. She tried to rattle its bars. Solidly immovable.

  Well and good. If, when tomorrow we come knocking at Gwendoline Tritton’s front door, she attempts to slink off this way with the CA 534, I’ll have the heftiest officer in my team posted here to stop her. Oh, yes, better have a woman officer, too, it may come to a body search.

  She took one last look at the looming shape of the big house. The one lit window in it was abruptly extinguished.

  Good, now for a quiet night at home and in the morning a conference with Mr Brown.

  *

  At home, however, she was soon to find the best laid plans of mice and men — another favourite John quotation — do ‘gang aft a-gley’. Hardly had she restored the stiff old mack safely to its accustomed peg than she heard John at the front door, and, his topcoat hardly off, asked him about the inquest, her head crowded once more with thoughts of Graham — her baby, the boy at school, the young man at college, the probationary police officer, the slumped dead body in Notting Hill’s Ladbroke Walk.

  ‘Oh well,’ John answered her, ‘you know how these things go, you ought to after all. A lot of dreary questions and very seldom any startling revelations. Some poor fellow from the police station had to give evidence about finding Graham. Pretty nasty for him. What was it he said? Yes, “whom I recognised from a part of the remains as my fellow officer, PC Graham Piddock.” But I did manage afterwards to have a brief word with him, thank him. And the verdict, of course, was that usual formal murder by a person or persons —’

  The phone rang then.

  Harriet, the thought of that call from Superintendent Robertson bursting into her mind again, snatched it up. It was only out of well-drilled habit that she simply gave the number and no more.

  But no one spoke in answer. Yet — she listened more intently — there seemed to be some faint background noise there.

  Then she heard something else, something odd.

  Yes. Yes, that’s it. Someone’s clinking something — a coin? — on some nearby window or other.

  Wait. Yes. It’s on the side of, surely, a phone-box.

  So, what is this? I don’t get many calls from a box nowadays. Not like in the old Stop the Rot time in B Division when I quite often used to get a threatening message from some no-good I was targeting.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, clearly, if a little cautiously. ‘Who’s calling?’

  Still silence.

  But, yes, the familiar heavy breathing of old. Though this hardly seems really heavy.

  ‘Hello, can you hear me? Who do you want to speak to?
’

  Then a voice, on the edge of being recognisable. Female, croaking a little.

  ‘Harriet?’

  Now, who’s this? Calling me Harriet, and, yes, it does seem to be somebody I know. But certainly not, from her voice, one of what John calls my mates.

  ‘I’ve got something important to tell you. It’s Beryl Farr, John’s Aunt —’

  The call at that moment clicked to an end. Blank silence.

  ‘John, it was Aunty Beryl. I think in a phone-box. But it sounds as if she’s been cut off.’

  Aunty Beryl, silly old fool, she thought, must have put in just one single coin. Probably still believes it’s enough for a long chat, may not have used a call-box for months, years even.

  But what’s she calling about? Asking not for John, but me. Harriet. And with, she said, something important to tell me. What? What could she have to tell me? Something that she, at least, thinks important? Yes, she must have had to come out to make her call in the dark, the dark she so dislikes.

  So why then doesn’t she fish out another coin and call again? Preferably pull out a whole purse-full.

  For half a minute more, for a full minute, she stood waiting for the ringing sound. Then she told herself the truth. Aunty Beryl hasn’t got any more coins. She went out to that call-box clutching just a single carefully selected one. And now she is standing there, feeling trumped by Fate.

  But which call-box is she in? And will she stay there long enough for me to jump in the car, find her? No, Moorfields and her flat were too far away.

  So … What?

  Yes, this is it.

  She looked round for her bag — there on the floor by her chair — grabbed it, snatched out her mobile, thumbed the number she miraculously recalled for British Telecom’s local, police-linked number-chasing line.

  ‘Good evening, Detective Superintendent Martens. Perhaps you remember me?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, Mrs Martens. It’s Ireen. We’ve often chatted. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve just had a call, from — from one of my snitches, probably in a box somewhere in the Moorfields area. They got cut off, and don’t seem to be trying to get through again. Can you do some urgent checking?’

  ‘No trouble, Mrs Martens.’

  ‘Good work. I’m on my mobile by the way. I’ll give you the number.’

  ‘OK. I’ll call you back, soon as.’

  Thank goodness for old contacts, and ones kept warm. And forgive me, Ireen, for lying to you about my snitch, bringing a little, hurry-up excitement into your life. But if Beryl isn’t exactly a common-or-garden snitch, she is, or she may be, an informant.

  But what about? What was she going to inform me of? And will Ireen be able to locate that call-box in time for me to ring her there? Or will she have left and gone back in the dark to her grim-looking lair? In the dark, where, John told me, she never ventures out.

  Absolutely afraid to go out at night. Yes, that’s precisely what John said. Not, as I thought there at The Willows when I was looking at that big Minutes Book again, disliking being out late at night. If Aunty Beryl never — really never — goes out at night, she won’t at all have left that WAGI Council meeting as late as a few minutes past eight o’clock, fully dark then at this time of year. So ferocious Gwendoline Tritton must have had her name added to that list of Those Present, together with that somehow convincingly precise, ‘Left meeting at 8.06 p.m.’, just in order to make me think the midnight meeting did really take place, trusting I wouldn’t believe it necessary actually to go to that grotty flat in Moorfields to check. Which, in fact, I did not do, even when I paid Beryl my visit.

  She stood looking at the phone.

  Ring, won’t you, ring. Find one more coin at the bottom of your handbag, Aunty Beryl, fumble it into the slot. Obey the written instructions in front of you and call me.

  Her mobile sprang to life. She grabbed it, gabbled out her number.

  ‘It’s Ireen, Mrs Martens. That call seems to have been made in a box at the corner of Harrington Street in Moorfields. Let me give you its number. I’d think that’d be your quickest way to get back to him.’

  Him? Him? Who the hell — Oh, God, yes, my famous snitch. She’s bound to have seen it as a man.

  ‘Let’s have it, Ireen. You’re a miracle worker.’

  In less than a minute she was dabbing out on her phone the call-box number. It rang. It rang and rang.

  Aunty Beryl, are you there? Don’t tell me you’ve gone back through the dark evening to your urine-smelly home.

  The ringing stopped. A trembling voice said ‘Yes?’

  ‘Beryl? Beryl, it’s me, Harriet.’

  ‘Oh, good. You know, I didn’t expect to be cut off so quickly. Not when I’d put in as much as I had. I think that’s extortionate. Someone ought to do something about it.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I agree. Absolutely. But you said you had something to tell me?’

  ‘Did I? Oh, yes. Yes, of course I did. But, you know, there’ve been a lot of nasty little boys all round the kiosk here, shouting and tapping at the glass, and everything’s gone right out of my head.’

  Oh, God. No.

  ‘Listen, Aunt — Listen, Beryl. Are the boys still there?’

  ‘Well, no. No. They ran off in the end, when they saw I was just standing here.’

  ‘All right, then. Now, can you think? You were going to tell me something you said was import —’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course. The daffodils. It was so kind of you to bring me them. I put them in water straight away, and, do you know, they’re as fresh today as when you gave them to me.’

  Must go easy with her. Must.

  ‘Well, I’m glad. I love daffodils at this time of year, a promise of all the good weather to come. But didn’t you say what you had to tell me was important? Can you remember what it was?’

  ‘Of course I can.’ A touch of the old familiar scratchiness. ‘I had a visit earlier today from Gwendoline Tritton. And she didn’t bring me flowers, I can tell you that.’

  ‘But why did she visit you? Does she often come?’

  ‘Of course not. Too wrapped up in herself and her doings, Gwendoline. Always was. No, she came specially. And do you know what she wanted me to do?’

  I think I do, Harriet said to herself. I think I do, and if I’m right it’s exactly what I need to know.

  ‘Yes, Beryl?’

  ‘She told me she had put in the Minutes of the WAGI Council that I had been present on the night of Tuesday, March the sixteenth. But I wasn’t present. And I told her so. She ought to have known I never set foot outside after dark. Never. She ought to have known that, but, as I say, too wrapped up in herself to think about anybody else.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve met her, and I agree.’

  ‘Well, do you know what she told me to do then? Ordered me to do? She told me that if anybody asked, and she mentioned you by name, Harriet, by name and police rank … She said I was to say I was there at that meeting. Well, I let her believe I would do it. There’s no arguing with some people, you know.’

  ‘Quite right. The only way to deal with someone like that.’

  She thought furiously. Found no way of ending the call in any sort of a tactful manner.

  ‘But — but I’m sorry, Beryl, I’ll have to ring off now. Something very urgent’s come up.’

  And, yes, she thought, it was quite right of you, Aunty Beryl, to venture out in the dark to that call-box, once you couldn’t smother your conscience a moment longer, to tell me what Gwendoline Tritton had demanded that you lie about.

  ‘John,’ she said. ‘Listen, I think I may have to go out. Aunty Beryl’s stuck at this time of night in a call-box in Moorfields. I’d better go — Or, no. No, I’ll ring the local PS. That’d be quicker after all.’ She rang the Moorfields police station. And put down the phone, happy in the thought that a good solid PC would soon be on his way to escort Aunty Beryl back home.

  Then, yes, she thought, I was right to tell the poor old thin
g that something urgent has come up. It’s an urgent matter now to make the raid on The Willows, before Gwendoline Tritton perhaps condescends to think a little about her church-mouse friend of old and realises she may not have done what she was commanded to do.

  ‘Listen,’ she said to John, ‘could you order a take-away supper? I’ve got work to do, calls to make.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once again the phone rang.

  Aunty Beryl back? Something more about the daffodils? But, no. No, can’t be her, she’s right out of coins.

  She picked up the handset, began reciting the number.

  ‘Mum?’

  The single syllable interrupting her struck like a hammer-blow.

  What? What can — This can’t be — It’s a hallucination. I’m going mad —

  ‘Mum, it’s me. Malcolm. Are you there?’

  ‘Malcolm, Malcolm. It’s you.’

  She could still hardly believe it was his voice in her ear. Somehow she had been thinking of him all along as infinitely removed from her own everyday life. As if, ill as he was, he was in a wholly different country. In Hospitalia.

  And now he was here. Or on the other end of a simple telephone line. Part of life.

  She felt her whole world, only days ago when she heard Superintendent Robertson ploddingly giving her the news that had seemed to turn everything in a moment upside down, now moving slowly towards where it ought to be. That great iron plate she had felt herself fixed to was slowly revolving back to the place it had been in when the world was altogether different, when Superintendent Robertson was not even a name to her. It was as if an iceberg, freed by global warming, was, against all expectations, drifting back towards the North Pole.

  Malcolm. Malcolm, here at the end of the phone.

  ‘Yes, of course it’s me, Mum,’ she heard him cheerfully go on. ‘Who else did you think it could be?’ A sudden halt. ‘Oh. Oh, Jesus, yes, I shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t really have thought it. Who else could it be, if it wasn’t me? Only Graham. Poor Graham. You never did learn to sort out our two voices, did you? Dad did. But it was always possible to trick you when we were kids. I’m sorry, Mum. I shouldn’t have started on this without thinking. I should have picked my words better. Sorry.’