Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

‘I don’t know the brand. It had pictures of different sorts on it, what you call it, an assortment.’

McLusky left a sergeant in charge of getting personal details and securing the site and joined Denkhaus who was staring unhappily out across the park and the city beyond.

‘We’ll have to search the entire park again for devices. Possibly all the parks. How many are there, sir?’

‘Too many. We might as well close the entire city. It can’t be done without declaring martial law and imposing a curfew. People will just have to be extra vigilant. I’ll arrange for another press conference but we can’t have people panicking, that’s what the bastard wants to happen.’

‘I get the feeling he wants people to stay quietly at home.’ So he can do what? McLusky had a mental image of a lone skateboarder moving through an empty town on an electric board, unimpeded by people or traffic. John Kerswill’s dream.

‘We don’t have the resources to close and search every park, railway station, bus and public space.’

‘I’m aware of it. We’ve had over five hundred false alarms so far, it seems we’re doing little else but chasing up suspicious packages.’ Each time a car backfired the phone lines got jammed with reports of bomb blasts. People saw bombs everywhere.

The sun disappeared and the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. McLusky cheered up. ‘We did them all a favour closing down the festival, saves them getting soaked. All snug in their cars now.’

Denkhaus grunted and walked off quickly towards his own car. He hated getting wet. ‘You’re in charge. I’ll call a press conference.’

McLusky stood on the knoll as the heavens opened. By the time Forensics turned up every officer in the park was soaked to the skin.

‘I still can’t get over how quickly you made up your mind. It would have taken me days of thinking about it. And you didn’t even test drive it.’

‘I’ve driven one before.’

Austin had given him a lift to the dealership. After spending half an hour looking at nothing but black cars he had turned around, pointed at an olive green Mazda 323 with excessive mileage and a thirsty engine and bought it.

‘It’s a kind of elimination process. If I look long enough at the wrong stuff then I suddenly find the right stuff.’

‘Does that work with suspects?’

‘Not so far.’

‘Shame.’ Austin rubbed a smoothing hand over the letter on the table to deflate the air bubbles in the evidence bag that protected the paper. He read out loud for the second time. ‘ Perhaps This will Shut you Up. I have Warned You. Now I will employ My Armies everywhere. Homes and Churches will be safe but Silence will settle on the Parks and Streets of this City .’

‘I know it by heart, Jane, there’s nothing there, no hidden clues. Photocopy it and get it off to Forensics. Even they should know it’s urgent by now though I expect them to find nothing.’

McLusky drove to Trinity Road, the central police station in St Phillips. At Technical Support he clicked the memory card from his mobile and handed it to a young suntanned technician. ‘See if you can do something with this. I shot some video at the kite festival just as the bomb went off. It’ll be crap quality — do you think you can sharpen it up somehow and stick it on a disk for us?’

‘Yeah, no sweat, we do that all the time. I’ll have a go at it now if you want to wait. Not got him yet, then?’

It was a rhetorical question and McLusky treated it as such. In turn he didn’t ask any questions beginning with ‘How on earth …’ about imaging technology and video enhancing. To him it was pure witchcraft. How you could take a rubbish image and turn it into a clear one was beyond his comprehension. Surely if something wasn’t there it wasn’t there?

But apparently not; in less than twenty minutes the technician was back, handing him his card and a CD in a hard protective case. ‘See how you get on with that. Hope you catch him soon.’

Back in his own office, still cramped with several TV monitors, he slipped the disk into his computer and settled down to watch with a mug of instant coffee and a custard Danish. There was only three minutes of footage. What Technical Support hadn’t managed to fix was the jerkiness of the camera movement. Off screen a tin-voiced superintendent spoke of the kite festival’s popularity. Then the sudden movement of the man falling backwards and the small plume of smoke blowing on the wind. People reacted by moving either away or towards the locus of the incident. Except …

Except one man. An elderly man carrying what looked like a canvas satchel on a strap across his chest and wheeling an electric bicycle. He looked up towards the victim, nodded — clearly nodded — and kept going. He was in shot for no more than four seconds but at least McLusky had been holding the mobile more or less still at the time. Old boy on bicycle. Another old boy on a bicycle. He remembered the man cycling away from the site of the burnt yacht Eleni . Had it also been an electric one? He couldn’t remember. There had to be thousands of men over sixty riding bicycles in this city, electric or otherwise.

He dug about on his already cluttered desk and found the disks Technical Support had produced from the SD cards Austin had commandeered on Brandon Hill after the first explosion. Some contained video footage and pictures taken before the explosion as well as after the incident. It didn’t take him long. There he was once more in a still photograph, obviously taken before the explosion. The camera was focused on the group in the centre, three middle-aged women posing in front of a bed of red and white flowers in the park. On the tarmac path behind he once more wheeled a bicycle, same man, same bicycle, same satchel. While zooming in on his target with clicks of the mouse he dialled the CID room number but before he got an answer there came a knock on his door. It was DC Dearlove with a sheaf of reports.

‘Dearlove, where is DS Austin?’

‘Ehm, haven’t seen him.’

He hung up. ‘Look at this man, Dearlove.’ He swivelled the monitor for him. ‘I think this might be our man.’

‘The wrinkly with the bike?’

The phone rang. ‘Hang on.’ He snatched up the receiver. ‘McLusky.’

‘Inspector McLusky, it’s Dr Thompson. At the Burns Unit, Southmead. We spoke in connection with a patient of mine, Ms Bendick.’

‘Oh yes, how is Ms Bendick?’

‘Recovering, though she will require extensive surgery. But that’s not what I’m calling about.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Well, it’s a bit tricky for me. It would mean breaking patient confidentiality and puts me in an awkward position.’

‘Look, doc, if you’re calling me then you’ve already made up your mind to tell me so why don’t you just go ahead and do it because I’m a bit busy right now.’

‘Okay, sorry, I’ll get to the point. I treated a patient in A amp;E the night before last. For burns to his right hand. These burns and the damage to his skin were quite severe in some places and will need aftercare but the point is he told me he had burned his hand at a barbecue. I’ve treated burns for eight years now and those injuries were not consistent with burning yourself on a barbecue. I have seen injuries like these before and they were invariably caused by fireworks going off in people’s hands. Naturally I thought of all those devices going off. The man may just be an innocent victim, I want you to bear that in mind.’

‘You were right to call me. You haven’t still got him there, then?’

‘Unfortunately not.’

‘Do you have his name?’

‘He didn’t want to give his name. Then later he said his name was Dave. But one of the nurses recognized him from a previous injury he presented involving some barbed wire and she thought his surname was Daws.’