by Jo Bannister
That had the desired effect. No one knew what she was shouting about, but every head turned her way. The smarter among them realised there was some danger, even though they couldn’t work out where or what it was. The very smartest headed for the car park without even trying to.
Hazel was almost fast enough. She reached Oliver Ford with an outstretched arm as the boy pointed the spray can in the historian’s face and thumbed down hard on the button, simultaneously flicking the cigarette lighter in his other hand.
She couldn’t reach the boy to wrest the components of his homemade flame-thrower from him. Instead she piled into Oliver Ford with enough force to throw him out of the belching flame, the fiery tongue that swept everything within a metre like a dragon’s breath.
Ford was in the blast zone for less than a second. But in projecting him out of range, Hazel took his place. She just had time to think, with a kind of desperate self-recrimination, ‘Oh bugger!’ Then the world blew up.
FOUR
The rest of the day passed in a kind of fog, neither sleeping nor waking. Hazel was aware of unfamiliar sounds, of people fussing round her, and later of people she felt she ought to know sitting with her and talking quietly. But the painkillers stopped her worrying too much about what they were saying. She was content to lie in this comfortable if unfamiliar bed and snooze, and protest weakly when someone came to take her temperature or check her dressings.
Somewhere during the night she started feeling more in touch with the world again, as well as sorer. She moved her head cautiously on the pillow, trying to work out who the slumbering figure in the chair beside her was. ‘Dad?’
Her voice wasn’t much more than a breath in the dim room. But Fred Best had been twenty years a soldier: like a flamingo, he slept with only half of his brain at a time. He was immediately wide awake.
‘I’m right here, Hazel. Everything’s all right. You’ll be fine in a few days. Are you in pain? I can get someone …’
She gave a minuscule shake of her head. A large dressing on her left cheek prevented her from moving far. ‘’M okay. What happened?’
‘There was an – incident – at the museum. Some kid tried to blow it up. Politics, I guess. The bloke who was opening it was in the firing line. You shoved him out of the way, but you took some of the blast yourself.’
Now she nodded, slowly, remembering. ‘Hairspray. And a cigarette lighter. And then …’ She frowned. ‘The roof fell in?’
Best gave a bleak chuckle. ‘No, but I bet it sounded like it. The can exploded in his hand. You were about four feet away at the time.’
Hazel winced. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Not yet. He lost the hand, I’m told, and he’s badly burned. They’ve got him under guard somewhere here in the hospital.’
Hazel was puzzled. ‘Isn’t a museum rather an odd thing to want to blow up? What was he hoping to achieve?’
‘He’s an Arab,’ said Best simply. He hoped that didn’t make him sound like a racist, but wasn’t concerned enough to tiptoe around the facts.
‘And Wittering is a Museum of the Crusades,’ murmured Hazel. ‘Still, eight hundred years is a long time to hold a grudge!’
‘Who cares about his cause?’ growled Best. ‘You behave like a terrorist, you forfeit the right to be heard.’
Something he’d said earlier caught up on her. ‘What did you mean,’ asked Hazel, ‘he’s not dead yet?’
‘I told you. There’s a guard on his room. I haven’t figured out how to get past them yet.’
Another visitor was Grace Maybourne. She considered Hazel pensively. ‘I was told I should keep an eye on you.’
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ insisted Hazel indignantly.
‘Of course not. Neither was what happened before. It’s just that, for good or ill, some people have the habit of being where the action is. You’re one of those people. That’s why I should keep an eye on you. Like watching a weather-vane.’
‘My dad said he was an Arab. Is that really what it was all about? He wanted to avenge the Crusades?’
Maybourne shook her head wearily. ‘Hardly credible, is it? All the trouble in the Middle East, and he’s nothing better to worry about than which bunch of religious maniacs held the keys to a desert city eight centuries ago. If people would just stop fixating on what happened to their ancestors and concentrate on what’s going to become of their children …!’
She heard herself growing strident and stopped abruptly. After a moment she said, in a normal tone of voice, ‘He’s still in intensive care, he wouldn’t make any sense even if we were allowed to interview him. When he’s on the mend, I’ll ask him if that’s really the best excuse he has for fire-bombing some history buffs, a TV personality and one of my officers.’
‘Will he live?’
‘Yes. He’ll need skin-grafts on his face, and they couldn’t save his hand, but he’ll live.’
‘Is he local? I didn’t recognise him.’
‘You wouldn’t. He flew in from Turkey on Monday.’
‘He came fifteen hundred miles to do this?’ What was left of Hazel’s eyebrows climbed until they met bandage. ‘What possible interest could a Turk have in a little museum in an English village? If he’d been an Iraqi or an Afghan, and it was a big London museum celebrating the modern British Army, maybe. But Wittering? I wouldn’t have thought the average Turk had even heard of it.’
‘We don’t actually know that he’s a Turk, only that Istanbul is where he boarded his flight. His passport was a forgery, so he could have come from anywhere.’
‘Do we know his name?’
‘Only the name on the documents we know to be false.’ Maybourne gave a troubled little smile. ‘Hazel, I don’t think you should spend too much time thinking about this man. He’s an angry, misguided young man who thought he could change history by hurting people who never hurt, or wanted to hurt, him or anyone he ever met. There is no sense in what he did, and therefore no point in wondering who he is or why he did it. You don’t need to know his name. He didn’t ask yours before he tried to kill you.’
‘To be fair,’ said Hazel reasonably, ‘it wasn’t me he was trying to kill. It was the TV personality that everyone’s heard of – that was how he was going to get the media coverage. And I want to know his name’ – she frowned, trying to explain it to herself as much as to the superintendent – ‘because he had some purpose in mind when he lit that spray-can. Who he is, where he came from, goes some way towards explaining what he did. I’d like to know what was going through his head when he burnt my fringe off!’
Maybourne was nodding as if something was becoming clear to her. Possibly it was nothing to do with the young man in intensive care. ‘Actually, Hazel …’
‘Mm?’
‘From what they tell me …’
Now she was becoming alarmed. ‘What?’
‘Your fringe is the least of your problems.’
At the weekend Gabriel Ash brought his two sons in to see her. That still gave Hazel a little start. She couldn’t get used to seeing two little boys where she was used to seeing the white lurcher. Of course, they didn’t let dogs visit you in hospital, although they would almost certainly be cleaner and less troublesome than little boys.
By now the dressings had been pared back so that she looked more like an Indian brave than an Indian maharajah. Looking in the mirror she’d insisted on having, she’d seen what Superintendent Maybourne had been referring to. Still wildly indignant, she made Ash look too. ‘What am I supposed to do with that? One plait? Half a Mohican? Or just keep walking anticlockwise so people only ever see the side of my head with hair still on it?!!’
‘I’m sure it’ll grow back,’ murmured Ash. ‘Won’t it?’
‘It had bloody better!’ snarled Hazel. ‘But it’ll take months. Years before both sides match again.’
‘Cut the other side,’ volunteered Gilbert.
He was the quieter, more intense, more intelligent of Ash’s boys. When he thought somethin
g was worth saying, it was usually worth listening to him.
Hazel stared at him. Dark-eyed and moody, his father at eight years old, he stared back. ‘You want me to shave both sides of my head? You really think that would be an improvement?’
‘He has a point,’ ventured Ash. ‘Not shave it, but cut it short. It’ll match up a lot quicker if you do.’
‘Have you any idea how long it took me to grow it?’ she demanded. ‘How long it takes me every night to wash it, dry it and plait it up, because otherwise I can’t get a comb through it in the morning? You think I do that because when I stagger in from a late shift smelling of stale beer, fish and chips, and vomit, there’s nothing I’d sooner be doing? I do it because … because …’
And there, hearing herself whining like a girl, she stopped. She shrugged and lay back on her pillows. ‘You’re right. Gilbert’s right. Who needs all that anyway? I’ll lop the rest off tomorrow.’
FIVE
Which is what she was doing, doggedly, refusing to think of it as a loss so much as a tidying-up of loose ends, when Oliver Ford arrived the next morning.
At first she couldn’t see who it was. She appeared to be getting a visit from an enormous bunch of flowers and a pair of shoes. It was only when the flowers addressed her, somewhat hesitantly, as ‘Constable Best?’ that she recognised him.
She might still have had trouble recognising him, even without the flowers. When he put them down on the bedside table, Hazel saw that the improvised flame-thrower had left its mark on him too. One side of his face and neck was a deep bluey-red, with some of the gubbins her own injuries were painted with on top.
‘Mr Ford! Have a seat.’ Then she realised that the chair was covered with a sheet of newspaper and her discarded hair, and she tried to bundle them out of sight before she embarrassed him.
It was too late. He’d seen the hair, the straw-gold profusion piled sadly beside her, and that side of his face that could do, paled. To her astonishment he was blinking back tears. ‘Oh Hazel …’
Somehow, his distress made her see her own for the self-indulgence it was. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she said briskly, ‘nobody died. Hair grows back; even skin grows back. A month from now you won’t know anything happened except that I had a haircut.’
‘Of course I’ll know,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I’ll know you saved my life, and risked your own to do it.’
Hazel cleared the chair and patted it. ‘That’s pretty much part of the job description. It isn’t a big part. You pick up a lot of drunks and take home a lot of nuisance kids, and stop a lot of bad drivers and you even give a lot of people the right time. But if push comes to shove, protecting the public is the highest priority. Higher than protecting yourself. Because that’s what you’re paid for, and they’re the ones doing the paying.
‘You don’t find yourself in that position very often,’ she assured him earnestly. ‘You can go through an entire career without finding it necessary to put your life on the line. But if the circumstances arise where you have to, you hope to God you will. Because otherwise there’s been an element of fraud in everything you’ve done. You’ve taken all the strawberry creams out of the chocolate box and left someone else with the jaw-breaker toffee.’
Ford laughed at that: an awkward, half-swallowed little laugh, because the last thing he wanted was for Hazel to think he was amused by her quaint, old-fashioned ideas about duty.
She put him at ease with a ready grin – a slightly lopsided grin, because one side of her face was swollen. ‘So thank you for the flowers. They’re beautiful. But they’re not strictly necessary. I did what I was there to do. Any of my colleagues would have done the same. As for that’ – she screwed up the newspaper and lobbed it into the waste-paper basket – ‘it’s time I tried a new hairstyle.’
Ford wasn’t deceived by her cavalier manner. He was however impressed by it. ‘When are you getting out of here?’
‘Tomorrow, I think. There’s nothing more to be done. Time and clean living will repair the damage.’
‘When you feel up to it, I’d like to take you out to lunch.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Hazel. ‘But like the flowers, it isn’t …’
‘… Strictly necessary. I know. But I’d enjoy it. Will you come? Nothing too formal – a country pub somewhere, if that’s your pleasure. I can’t repay what you did for me. But I can thank you.’
‘Well … that would be very pleasant,’ decided Hazel. ‘If we can find somewhere that’ll let us through the door looking like this.’
The idea that he might not be welcome somewhere clearly surprised Oliver Ford. A dangerous light flickered in his eye. ‘You choose where we’re going,’ he said, ‘and if there are any problems, I’ll buy the place.’
Hazel chuckled. Only when Ford failed to join in did she realise that he was entirely serious. ‘I’ll give it a bit of thought.’ She scribbled out her number. ‘Call me tomorrow and we’ll find a day. How long are you going to be in the area, anyway?’
Ford gave an elegant shrug. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve still got to open that museum. I never did cut the damned ribbon. Then there’s filming for the series – but Emerald may want to wait until I look a bit more like my mug-shots again.’
They chatted inconsequentially for a few minutes, then Ford got up to leave. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ He got as far as the door, then hesitated. ‘Time and clean living, you say?’
Hazel’s smile broadened. ‘They sort out most problems.’
He sighed. ‘I may have to settle for what time alone will achieve.’
The burns specialist paid Hazel a last visit the following morning. ‘Come back in three days and we’ll check those dressings. Apart from that, all you need do is keep it dry, put your feet up and stay out of trouble. Finish the painkillers but I don’t think you’ll need any more. Take a couple of weeks off work, and be a bit careful with yourself for a month after that.’
Hazel scowled. ‘I’ve only just got back to work.’
‘And now you’re off again,’ he said, entirely without sympathy. ‘A fortnight at least, longer if there are any signs of infection. Just be glad you don’t need grafts – we’d be talking months then.’
There was one last thing Hazel needed to do before she left. Perhaps needed wasn’t the right word, but it was more than casual curiosity. She’d come through the attack without permanent damage, yet she felt to have left something behind in that little stone-walled courtyard. One thread of her existence had become ravelled up in the desperate moment of the explosion, and though she had emerged essentially intact, it hadn’t come with her. It was there still, tangled, waiting for resolution. There were two things she needed to do to make herself whole again. One was to return to the museum. The other was to understand why.
She found her way to intensive care. Constable Budgen was propped in a chair by the entrance to the ward, reading a magazine. It was called Fancy Birds and had a couple of cool chicks strutting their stuff on the front cover. Constable Budgen was a pigeon fancier.
‘Hi, Wayne. So you drew the short straw. Anything happening?’
He had the magazine halfway to the floor before he saw who it was and retrieved it. ‘Hi, Hazel. Yeah – Mr Gorman asked for volunteers to stand guard here, and everyone else took one step backwards.’
Hazel chuckled in sympathy. She had a fondness for Wayne Budgen. He was a decent, well-meaning, unambitious young copper and though he would never make chief constable, she doubted if he’d ever do the dirty on anyone either, which was perhaps more important.
‘No,’ he went on, answering her last question, ‘not a thing. He’s well out of it. Poor little bugger.’ Then he looked up, guiltily. ‘Sorry, Hazel – I know he hurt you. I know he came here to hurt people. But you look at him lying in that bed, half his body covered in burns and a bloody great dressing where his hand ought to be, and he doesn’t look old enough to be out alone. And you wonder who the hell made him hate us so much that this seem
ed like a good idea.’
Knowing she probably shouldn’t, but also that right now – seared and cleansed and dosed with antibiotics – she was as aseptic as a human being ever wants to be, she edged into the ward, to where she could see him. Or as much of him as wasn’t covered in gel and bandages. She’d had a good look at him at the museum and exchanged a few words, and she expected to recognise him now. But his own mother wouldn’t have recognised him now. Wayne Budgen was right. He was just a poor little bugger who’d been conned into believing that someone else’s death was more important than his life.
‘Do we have a name for him yet?’
Budgen shook his head. ‘False papers. He could be anybody.’
Hazel was still looking at the unconscious figure, horribly flat under the hospital sheet. ‘He isn’t, though,’ she murmured. ‘He has a name. He has a family, and friends, and there are things he cares about and things he believes in. What in the name of God did he hope to achieve by fire-bombing an obscure little museum in the middle of England?’
‘He’s an Arab.’
Hazel went on waiting. She thought there was more coming. But there wasn’t: that was it. ‘So?’
‘Well – they do hate us, don’t they? In the name of God.’
‘I think that’s a bit sweeping,’ frowned Hazel. ‘But even if it is that simple, that he wanted to kill English people because of … whatever … why come all the way to Wittering? There aren’t any English people in London, where his plane landed? There weren’t any in Birmingham where he got off the train? What brought him all this way to do what he did?’
‘The Crusader connection?’ hazarded Budgen. ‘He was striking a blow at British imperialism.’
‘By fire-bombing a TV celebrity? How many Arabs have even heard of Oliver Ford? Hell, Gabriel hadn’t heard of him. He might think he’s universally famous, but he isn’t.’