Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

As the girl set the enormous cup of froth in front of him a loud bang outside made her jump and sharply draw in breath. McLusky tried to reassure her. ‘Just someone dropping stuff into an empty skip.’ He had caught a glimpse of the battered yellow mini-skip at the end of the lane earlier.

The girl relaxed her shoulders. ‘Well, after what happened yesterday you can’t help thinking. Another one could go off any time, couldn’t it?’

‘Is that what you think? That there’ll be another one?’

‘I don’t know, do I? But it’s scary, isn’t it, if someone blows up stupid things like a pavilion. On the tube you’d expect a bomb, but if they blow up stuff like that then anything could explode next. I never thought it would come here.’

‘I don’t think it has. I don’t think it was a terror bomb.’

‘Well, if it makes people terrified then I think it is.’

The girl had a point. As she left to serve other customers he tasted his coffee. His scale of coffee-rating only had three levels — ‘awful’, ‘drinkable’ and ‘the best’. This one was just about drinkable.

It did however have the desired effect of sharpening his senses. As he continued on his erratic march across town he took everything in precisely, filing away into his memory intersections, back streets, alleys and steps, possible shortcuts. He looked keenly, not like a tourist, but like someone taking possession of a new car, a new house, a new lover. Everything interested him from street furniture to the location of the banks and the number of CCTV cameras. His street instincts were good today and eventually he found himself at the western end of Brandon Hill without having consulted the A-Z in his jacket pocket once. The park was still closed to the public and all entrances were guarded by extremely bored uniformed police. McLusky showed his ID and ducked under the tape. He avoided the locus of the explosion and took a circuitous route to the top of the hill dominated by a hundred-foot tower built from pink sandstone. He climbed the narrow winding stone steps that led him breathlessly to the top. From here he had views across the city in all directions but what interested him lay directly below. It wasn’t exactly Central Park but for a fingertip search it was big enough. There was a large children’s play area, plenty of trees, a pond. The entire area had been combed. There was no separate parks police so Avon and Somerset had provided enough manpower to make sure there were no more devices hidden in the grounds. Suspicious items had of course been found. Two had been blown up in controlled explosions by Royal Engineers; both had been duds. One turned out to be an old dried-up can of yacht varnish. The other had been a rucksack of an Italian tourist, already reported lost. Inside, among other possessions, were his camera and his passport, both now vaporized.

He clattered back down the ancient steps and approached the locus of the explosion. An inner circle had been taped off here, covering the area of scattered debris. A lone CSI technician wearing a coverall was still or again going over the scene, this time with a metal detector. He looked up, annoyed at seeing him approach. ‘Can you stay beyond that case, please?’ He pointed to an aluminium case standing on the path.

McLusky stopped dutifully by the case and brandished his ID. ‘DI McLusky.’

‘Makes no difference, I’m afraid.’

‘Point taken. Anything in particular you’re looking for today?’

‘You should get a preliminary report sometime this afternoon.’ He hesitated. ‘But yeah.’ The man came over to him, carrying an evidence bag. He held it up for him to examine. It contained a very small piece of metal that could have belonged to some kind of mechanism. ‘The device contained a timer, inspector. They used a wristwatch. A mechanical one works best for this kind of thing. Tick tock, a real ticking time bomb. I’ve come back to see if I can recover more of the pieces. I’m not saying we’ll get it back to work but the more of the pieces we have the greater the chance that Forensics can come up with a make. If it was a new watch then it will probably turn out to have been Russian.’

‘Russian? Why’s that?’

‘Real wind-up watches are relatively expensive but the Russians still make cheap ones you can buy here and there. You would probably not go and buy a precision Swiss watch just to blow it up. So unless you had an old one hanging about you’d probably buy a crap Russian one from a catalogue showroom. It’ll last just long enough to do the job.’

‘I see.’ He looked at his own wristwatch which was a cheap battery job from a catalogue showroom. ‘So if it had a timer that means it wasn’t radio controlled or anything? Not set off remotely by someone watching for his victim to get near it?’

‘That’s correct. It was a very simple device, anyone could have built it. It’ll say so in the report, I’m sure.’

‘So if you’re using a wind-up watch how long in advance can you set the bomb to go off?’

‘Twelve hours. Enough time to get to the other side of the world, inspector.’

Or Turkey. ‘Thanks. Good hunting.’ Or whatever one wished people who hoovered grass for a living. Anyone could have built it? McLusky was sure he wouldn’t know where to start. His understanding of things explosive began and ended with the kind where you put a match to a fuse and retired to a safe distance. He ducked out of the perimeter on the other side. He called Austin on his mobile. ‘I’m in Great George Street. Bring the car. No, your car.’ He smoked two cigarettes before Austin crept up on him in a minute Nissan. Not really a convincing car for a big hairy DS, thought McLusky, even in blue.

The car park at Blaise Castle Estate out in Henbury had plenty of space this cold April lunchtime. The man at the estate office glanced at their IDs and gave them directions without asking what they had come about. They had to walk back along the road they had come and long before they got to the nursery McLusky wished they had taken the car. The signs on the gate declared No Parking and No Public Access . McLusky and Austin weren’t public. They pushed through and walked up between long propagating houses and through an open door into a large shed with a concrete floor. There were wooden bays containing various composts and more empty flowerpots than seemed possible. By a still-steaming kettle stood two young men in green dungarees and green T-shirts, chomping sandwiches.

One of them swallowed down a large mouthful, looked like he regretted it for a second, then challenged them. ‘Help you gentlemen?’

They showed IDs. McLusky looked around. ‘Boss about?’

‘On her lunch break. It’s about the bomb, is it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘We’re putting in for danger money.’

‘Good thinking. You wouldn’t of course have any idea who would want to blow up a shelter in Brandon Hill?’

‘Not the foggiest, and we’ve been thinking hard.’ He reached up a hand as if to scratch his head but changed his mind. His thin hair was ineptly spiked into a ridge that ran down the centre of his head like a flailed hedge.

The other man spoke with a strong Bristol accent, modified by sandwich. ‘We hope it’s no one with a grudge against the park, since we’re out there all the time, like. We was planting bulbs around there only the other day, all round that shelter.’

‘Well, last October actually.’ The thin-haired gardener gave his colleague a pitying look.

‘A grudge against the park? Or the parks department? Has anyone left under a cloud recently?’

They looked at each other for a split second, seeming to come to an instant agreement on the matter. ‘Yeah, Three Veg did.’

‘Yup, got fired.’