Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

‘Yeah, I know the things. Bloody menace.’

‘Well, quite a few people got annoyed and had a look at what it was and all saw the same bloke.’

‘The motorized skateboarder … the boy, Joel, he mentioned him. Do we have a description?’

‘Strictly speaking it’s the board that’s motorized of course.’

‘Jane …’ McLusky managed to ladle quite a bit of menace into the word.

Austin rattled it off from memory. ‘Tall, skinny, spiked hair, sunglasses, denims, red scarf and skateboarding gear, knee pads, that sort of thing. Mid-to-late thirties.’

‘Late thirties? You’d have thought he’d have better things to do than skating in the park. Right. I want him. He’s been up and down the street, he’ll have seen something others didn’t. Shouldn’t be difficult to find. If anyone sees a bloke on a motorized skateboard tell them to kick him off it and bring him in. Illegal except on private land anyway if my memory serves me right.’ McLusky stubbed his cigarette out on the aluminium window frame. ‘Okay, I’ll dive into these.’ He pulled the pile of reports towards him. ‘Oh, before you go, what does one do for coffee around here?’

Austin stood in the door, suppressing a sigh. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘No, no, I’m old enough to get my own. Just point me towards it.’

The DS cheered up immediately. ‘Ah, well, in that case it all depends. There’s the machine at the end of the corridor if you like your water brown. There’s the canteen if you want molasses and there’s a kettle in the CID room, bring your own mug and put 10p in the jar.’

‘Instant?’

‘Instant. DI Fairfield has a cappuccino maker in her office.’

‘Has she?’

‘Only for the inner circle.’

‘And they are?’

‘DS Sorbie, DCI Gaunt, the super … basically everyone above her own rank and anyone below her own rank who’s about to get bullied into doing her a favour.’

‘You ever tasted it?’

‘Not me. It’s not fair trade coffee, if you get my drift. I’ve managed to avoid it so far.’

‘All right. Thanks for explaining the politics of coffee to me, Jane.’ He waited until Austin had closed the door before sliding open the desk drawer and taking out a half-eaten Danish pastry from Rossi’s. Coffee might have to wait though. He started reading the reports, scattering bits of flaked almond over the pages. Everybody had seen something, everyone remembered someone else, only no one remembered anything significant. Those residents whose houses faced the park had given the most detailed descriptions. It was unsurprising. Those actually in the park were all there for different reasons. ‘Taking the air’ were the pensioners, using it as a shortcut were the busy people, ‘hanging out’ were the kids playing truant. Pram pushers, dog walkers and tourists made up the rest; all had their own agendas. But those who lived west of the park had gone to their windows in order to look. Everyone saw the skateboarder. One witness even described Elizabeth Howe, sitting on one of the benches in the shelter, resting with her shopping. This was corroborated by a dog walker in the park. According to him Howe gathered her shopping bags and had just set foot on the path when the bomb went off. Her body was blown forward by the explosion and she twisted while falling, landing back first on the path. Through some sort of miracle nobody was close enough to the bomb to get killed. Two witnesses saw a couple hugging and kissing earlier on one of the benches. One remembered a young man sitting on the other side, drinking beer from a can. Another saw a three-or four-year-old girl stand on one of the benches before being fetched away by a woman. Lucky family. Nobody saw the container, nobody saw anyone acting suspiciously.

McLusky finished the Danish, licked his fingers and wiped them on his jeans but they remained faintly sticky. He closely read all the reports and notes and got a mental picture of people moving through the park; the skateboarder, woman and child, beer-drinking type, snogging couple, a sprinkling of tourists; Elizabeth Howe and Joel Kerswill walking past each other in different directions. Then the bang. He imagined it from above, watching a silent explosion as from a hovering balloon, saw himself, Austin and Constable Hanham run towards the scene. Too late, it was all too late. McLusky saw it in his mind as though he was there, hovering. He had been there and he had been useless. It unfolded in front of his eyes like a movie scene, shot from high above the trees, and he wished he could simply play the film backwards until a figure would walk up, reach for the bomb, put it back into the bag … Because there would be a bag, of course, it would also be quite heavy. Perhaps it had been left inside the bag and that had been destroyed by the blast …

Impatiently he shuffled the papers into a messy pile and pushed his chair back on its castors. How was he supposed to draw a bead on this idiot from these bits of paper? They were out there, somewhere, either kids reading about their own prank in the Evening Post or a malicious crank gloating over the column inches he had been given. Far less likely was an inept assassin analysing what went wrong, planning his next move. Since when did they go around assassinating kids and ex-postmistresses? Post … postal workers … mail. No, it didn’t fire his synapses. All he had was Colin Keale, a known bomb-maker, in Turkey, a retired woman and a kid wanting to be a gardener.

McLusky grabbed his jacket and made for the bathroom down the corridor where he washed the stickiness off his hands, then he clattered down the stairs and out into the thin April light. He never found it easy to grasp a case while locked up inside an office, especially one as dispiriting as the one they had found for him at Albany Road. If you wanted to do policing you had to be out in the street and he didn’t even know most of the streets in this city. As a police officer you had to do more than just know them, you had to own the streets and feel in your bones that you did. My city, my streets, my patch .

It looked like a good-enough patch, though there was a chill wind blowing through the narrow lanes of the Old Town. The endless procession of traffic snarled like giant knotted ropes up and down the streets as he walked in the vague direction of the river. Cars, vans, lorries, pedestrians, taxies, minibuses, cyclists, motorized rickshaws and of course scooters squeezed through the unquiet heart of the city. Scooters were everywhere now. They seemed to be the new weapon of choice for many commuters and they were being bought, ridden, crashed and stolen everywhere.

Eventually he found himself walking near a ruined church in a convoluted bit of park. He walked purposefully on into a busy area of tall Georgian buildings. He squeezed through a crowded food market in Corn Street, keeping a sharp lookout. He had planned to enter the first cafe he found but had already dismissed the first two as unlikely candidates for the best cappuccino in town which was what he was looking for. In McLusky’s opinion there really was no point in drinking imitation coffee. Find the best and stick to it. It should only take me a year, he thought, there were cafes and restaurants and takeaway coffee places every few yards. He abhorred drinks in Styrofoam cups and hence avoided the takeaways. The chances that a barista first brewed the finest coffee in town then poured it into plastic cups were anyway frankly remote. Eventually he simply picked a small cafe called Cat’s Cradle where a table had just become free. He ordered a large cappuccino from the frizzy-haired girl behind the counter and sat on a cold chrome chair at a cold steel table by the window. He watched the people passing in the narrow lane. At this time of day there were mostly women in the streets, he noticed, and the place was busy. The city attracted a fair number of tourists even this early in the season. Museums, art collections, the science park and historic ships, both real and replica, in the old harbour seemed to be the main attraction.