Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

‘Well, I’m sure it is, really.’ Rennie probably thought he was an idiot for not understanding it but he hadn’t touched a chemistry book since school, and even then reluctantly. ‘I was wondering though if you, as a chemist and being local and … being a chemist, if you could tell me …’ He was making a hash of this for some reason. ‘Tell me what you think. What kind of person would use those chemicals to build a bomb like that? How easy would it be? That sort of thing.’

‘That sort of thing.’ She gave him a quick smile. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

‘Yes please.’ It was the blueness of her eyes, he decided. Same blue as Laura’s. Laura, who had had enough. Who had dumped him while he was in hospital recovering from having been run over in the line of duty. Laura, for whom ‘getting himself run over’ had been the last straw. As soon as he’d been definitely recovering, as soon as she heard him try the first feeble joke about getting a job as a sleeping policeman, she had decided it was safe to go. Police officers needed police officers’ wives, she’d told him, and sorry but she knew she would never make one of those.

‘Okay, then concentrate, inspector. Potassium nitrate, sulphur, charcoal, surely you must remember that much from school?’

‘I was rubbish at science.’

‘History, then.’

‘What’s potassium — ’ he lent across to read — ‘nitrate?’

‘Potassium nitrate is saltpetre.’ She prompted her slow pupil. ‘Saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal …’

‘Oh, that’s gunpowder.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Good old black powder, inspector.’

‘So we’re not talking fertilizer bomb, plastic explosives or dynamite.’

‘We’re talking cannon, musket, firecracker, rocket. It says here that it was pure, industrial grade, so wasn’t home-made from stuff you scrape off a urinal wall and mix with barbecue charcoal, though that can be done if you have enough chaps peeing long enough against a wall. Can’t say I’d fancy that route either.’

‘So unless it’s someone licensed to fire historical weapons that require gunpowder then this is someone who bought a lot of fireworks, took them apart and then filled his container with the gunpowder? So it could be kids, after all.’

‘Kids with a bit of pocket money, yes. That amount of gunpowder would require quite a few fireworks.’

‘But probably not enough to arouse suspicion if you bought them over a period of time or at different outlets. Enough to kill …’ McLusky knew this already but was thinking aloud now.

‘Oh, certainly. Anyone too close could have been killed by the shrapnel or burnt to a frazzle when the petrol in the container caught. It’s just as it said in the paper, it was a miracle no one died.’

‘ Burnt to a frazzle , is that a scientific term?’

‘Absolutely. And an apt description of what would have happened had someone been sitting on the bench under which the device exploded.’

‘Though if you wanted to make sure to kill and maim lots of people you would stuff the thing with nails etc.’

‘Yes. My guess is this was designed to make a big bang and look spectacular.’

‘It certainly did that, it sent up a huge black cloud.’ A smoke signal. ‘Could still just be vandalism then.’

‘Yet whoever did it clearly didn’t care that people might get killed, maimed and burnt or they wouldn’t have left it where they did.’

‘Yes. The technical police term for those is arseholes .’

‘The psychology department is in a different building, inspector.’ Dr Rennie pushed the report towards him.

McLusky rolled it up like a newspaper, then patted his pockets for a card. ‘I was going to leave you my card but I haven’t had time to get any printed yet. I’m new in town.’ He spotted a cube of notepaper on the desk and pulled it towards himself, then found a pen in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a heavy brushed-steel biro he didn’t remember buying. Nice, though. ‘I’ll leave you my numbers.’ He scribbled down office and mobile numbers, hoping he’d got them right.

‘What are you leaving them for, inspector?’

McLusky had no idea. He shrugged. ‘Just in case.’

‘I see.’ She rose, the interview terminated.

He thanked her, nodded at the lab rat, who ignored him, and left.

Once outside again it took him a moment to remember where he had left the Polo. Mallzheimer’s they called it now when you couldn’t remember where you’d parked your car. Fortunately his stood out by dint of being old, ugly and a shade of white no manufacturer had used for twenty years. He wondered just how this piece of junk had survived to be a police vehicle in the twenty-first century. He turned on his airwave radio and it sprang to life with urgent calls. McLusky answered it and everything changed.

Maxine Bendick dried herself quickly, pulled her shower cap off and shook her hair loose. She had it cut shorter when she joined the gym so as to save even more time. After checking her watch she dressed in front of her locker. It might be a bit of madness but taking the thirty-minute lunchtime slot changed her working day completely. On the days when she trained, lunch breaks were something to look forward to, and not just because it meant a change from the tedium of pacifying irate tax payers on the phone. For years she had spent depressing lunch breaks walking to the Metro Market, cramming a plastic container with as much pasta salad in mayonnaisy gunk as would fit, then eating it with a plastic fork, sitting on the tiny green near her office in good weather but, this being England, for much of the year at her desk. Now she had the frisson of the dash across town, the mad rush to get changed and what usually amounted to no more than twenty minutes of training with Pat. Even though it hardly progressed beyond the warm-up it left her invigorated and helped her survive the afternoon. Pat stood for Patricia but Maxine had been quite happy to let her colleagues believe it stood for Patrick and that he was handsome. She had no idea what had brought on the fitness craze, she had no weight to lose, in fact had put on weight as she built up muscle, and didn’t know anyone else at the gym. It had just grabbed her imagination one day and she’d got hooked. Going to the gym meant eating a home-made sandwich in the car while she was driving and less time to chat with colleagues but it was worth it. Even here she didn’t have time to make friends at this pace. She’d seen all four other girls that were in this changing room before but never had enough time to do more than smile and nod at them while she rushed. She crammed the gear into her holdall, pulled on her jacket and slammed the locker. As she hoisted the bag over her shoulder she could feel the hard object in her jacket pocket. She pulled it out. Why she had picked it up when she never used face powder or any make-up for that matter was beyond her. Probably because it was shiny and it meant getting something for free. Perhaps she should offer it to one of the girls. She prised the lid open.

The crack of the explosion and the blue, searing flash were simultaneous. Had she not been blinded and distracted by the agonizing pain of her nose being burnt away by a tongue of flame, she’d have noticed the first third of her left thumb fly off and thud into the open locker of one of the girls. All she knew was that her face was on fire. She didn’t know that she was screaming, she thought it was the others. Running blindly in the direction of the showers she collided with the door frame and fell to the ground. She clutched at the unbelievable pain in her face. It felt sticky.

‘Oh God, oh my God.’

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Her face just blew up.’