Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

Traffic didn’t seem as bad today, moving at a steady snail’s pace. She was even lucky with a parking space and found one close to the exit. This made all the difference. If her parking space was at the ‘good’ end she would take the long way to the gym, cutting through Brandon Hill. It was a longer walk but it was worth it, reminding her that there was life beyond houses and housing. Her new Mini bleeped and blinked as its central locking engaged and Maxine walked off at a brisk pace. The drizzle was turning to rain but she didn’t mind. A glint caught her eye. Something square and shiny was lying on the tarmac close to the exit of the car park. It looked like a powder compact. A young couple were walking towards it. Surely they would claim it? A little girl’s voice inside her shouted No, I saw it first! then the couple had walked past it without noticing. Maxine quickly stooped and picked it up. It was indeed a gold compact. It was quite clean and unscratched, so couldn’t have been lying there long. Not real gold, probably, the metal was a bit too pale for that, though it was satisfyingly heavy. Maxine slipped it into her jacket pocket. There was no time to look at it now. She shrugged her sports bag higher on to her shoulder and hurried towards the park.

‘I was always crap at chemistry.’ McLusky had spoken out loud in the privacy of his empty office though he would happily have admitted it in company. He didn’t understand half of what the report said. He turned to the end of each section and read through the conclusions. More jargon. The Forensic Science Service at Chepstow had worked fast, had worked miracles, in fact. Getting at least some of the evidence from the locus of the blast analysed within a week was lightning speed compared to normal procedure and had only been accomplished with considerable pressure from the ACC.

Usually there was nothing too complicated about these reports but this time he had no idea what firm conclusions he should draw from the make-up of the device.

Joel Kerswill had given a written statement that offered them nothing more than another description of the skateboarder. Elizabeth Howe, the second victim, had abruptly regained consciousness two days after the explosion. Spookily, it had been at the exact hour of the blast, as though she had heard an echo that had at last awoken her. If so, then it had certainly been a mental echo; she had two perforated eardrums. They’d finally been allowed to talk to her yesterday. The interview had been conducted entirely in writing, to spare Ms Howe’s ears. The prognosis for recovery was good.

She remembered sitting on the bench to rest before continuing to carry her meagre shopping home. The next thing she remembered was being lifted up, like in a dream. She couldn’t actually remember hearing the explosion.

No new clues about people or events, nothing about the bomb itself. Not one witness had noticed a container under any of the benches.

This much he did understand from the FSS report: the metal container that had held the explosive device — a tin in which Glenfiddich whisky was sold — had also contained an amount of petrol. The device had been triggered with the help of a simple timer constructed from a Russian-made mechanical wristwatch and a run-of-the-mill three-volt battery. The rest of the report was so much gobbledegook. Very precise gobbledegook, naturally. The FSS prided itself on it, which meant their reports were littered with provisos, approximations and qualifications — probably no smaller than but not exceeding.

In other words, what he wanted was an interpreter. He stuck his head round the door of the CID room. ‘Jane, the university?’

Austin looked up from a pile of painful paperwork and pointed a plastic biro over his shoulder. ‘Yes, Liam. Big thing up the hill, can’t miss it.’

‘I take it they have a chemistry department?’

‘I should think so.’

‘Good. I need help with bomb-making.’

‘Aha. So what did you make of the forensic report?’

‘Oh, I think I’ve cracked it.’ He pulled a face he hoped expressed cheerful disgust and walked off down the corridor.

DS Sorbie was muttering to himself from behind his desk. ‘Cracked yourself.’ The new boy was swanning around the city running after one single crank who let off a firecracker while the rest of them worked on ten case files at the same time and drowned in paperwork and stupid initiatives. The runaway ten-year-old boy had at least been found, albeit half-dead after what looked like a hit and run on the A road leading to the motorway. There’d been more muggings by the scooter-riding muggers. An attempted abduction of a young woman near the harbour and the never-ending string of drug-fuelled burglaries. Perhaps McLusky would do them all a favour and get himself run over again, then normal service could resume. And maybe then they might promote someone around here rather than import inspectors from outside.

McLusky turned off Park Street into the university hinterland and amused himself by trying to rip the exhaust off the Polo by bouncing it over the ambitious speed humps. After much cruising about he found a parking space at hikable distance from the chemistry teaching laboratories and started marching towards them while dialling the number Tony Hayes at the front desk had found for him. He was put through to the science department and talked to three different people until he found someone who might be able to help him.

‘And is there anybody I could talk to today, perhaps?’

‘I’ll try Dr Rennie for you, see if she’s in.’ Dr Rennie was and might fit the inspector in sometime late afternoon. ‘You’re here already? Hang on, inspector, I’ll ask her again …’

McLusky ghosted through empty, brightly lit corridors until he found the right place.

‘Do you always make appointments this way? You must have a lot of wasted journeys.’

‘Surprisingly few, actually.’

Dr Rennie didn’t offer to shake hands as she held open the glass door of the laboratory to him. Under her open lab coat she was wearing a slate-grey knee-length skirt and an ash-grey roll-neck top. She knew how to throw intimidating glances over fashionably narrow spectacles. ‘Sit down, inspector.’ She indicated a chair at a desk that faced the glass wall separating lab and corridor. Not a private room of study but one where results were shared, discussed, analysed. The place didn’t smell of anything much. McLusky could even make out a faint trace of the doctor’s dark perfume. There was only one other person in the airy room, a thin, prematurely balding man endlessly ferrying trays of small containers from long white desks in this room into a windowless store room on the far side of the teaching laboratory. McLusky thought he detected a faint asthmatic wheeze each time he walked past.

‘What is it you need help with?’

McLusky handed over the slim file he had brought. ‘I got this report from Forensics in Chepstow. What I want to know is — ’

She interrupted his flow with a shake of her head. ‘Let me read it first, then ask your questions. That way I can read it without bias.’

She really was a scientist then. ‘Sure, doc.’

Dr Louise Rennie made herself more comfortable in her chair and started reading. Every time she turned a page she also returned imaginary strands of her fine blonde hair behind her ears with an unconscious gesture of one hand which made him believe that her severely short haircut was a recent development. There was a fan humming somewhere and the wheezy lab rat clinked and padded to and fro, eyeing them with irritation at each passing. Yet it was quiet enough in the room for him to hear the swish of her tights when she crossed, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. He noticed her skirt riding up a few inches above her knee and she noticed him noticing and sighed. She was a very fast reader. ‘Yes, that’s all quite straightforward.’