James Munro - The man who sold death

"Special Boat Service," said Marshall. "A tough job. We'll have to get on to the Admiralty about this lot."

Hoskins grunted, and dived into the safe once more. From the back of it he extracted a roll of black woven cloth, and let it unwind in his hands. It formed a long, thin line to the floor, and Hoskins wound it up again carefully, almost with reverence.

"Judo black belt," he said.

"Is that good?" Marshall asked.

Hoskins nodded. "Too good for me. The best there is." He turned to Miss Cross. "Have you seen this before?" She shook her head.

"I don't think it was Mr. Craig's," she said. "Why not?"

"Judo's wrestling, isn't it?" Hoskins nodded. "Mr. Craig wasn't interested in that sort of thing. He wasn't a rough sort of man."

Marshall looked at the photographs in his hands. The man they showed was young, scarcely a man at all by legal definition, but hard as nails. He looked back at Miss Cross, who had made Craig over in a different image; bowler hat, Bristol saloon, the casual gallantry of the wardroom; Miss Cross loved what she had made. Perhaps that was how Mrs. Craig had felt too. Marshall said nothing, but he kept the photographs, and the belt.

Marshall and Hoskins went back to the station to sort out what they'd got before conferring with the police surgeon and the expert from the forensic laboratory. The sergeant on duty told Marshall that the chief constable would like to see him as soon as the conference was finished. Marshall listened, impassive, and Hoskins ached in sympathy for him. A detective inspector with nothing to report should at least be spared chief constables.

Two men waited for them in Marshall's tiny office. Thomas, the police surgeon, was slow, bespectacled, taciturn, and fair-minded to the point where defense counsel bought him drinks. The man from the forensic lab, Inspector Maynard, was an ex-Royal Engineer whose passion for explosives had survived even bomb disposal. As Marshall entered, he slapped him gratefully on the shoulder.

"Well, Bob," he said. "You've sent us a beauty this time."

"Glad you like it," said Marshall, but he was thinking of the chief constable, and his voice was sour.

"Biggest we've ever had," said Maynard. "Enormous. You know we found pieces of that car in a tree fifty yards away? And we had to cut them out. They were going like bullets. They might as well have dropped an H-bomb on the poor bastard. I've never seen anything like it."

"What did they use?" Marshall asked.

"Hard to say yet," Maynard said. "Gelignite maybe. If it was, they used a hell of a lot. In fact, I thought it was something a bit more lively at first. Plastic stuff maybe. The blast waves were all wrong for dynamite."

"It wasn't TNT?" Marshall asked.

Maynard said, "The detonation would be too difficult. You need something with a big impact for that, like a bomb or a shell."

He settled back with the contentment of a man who knows he's going to say something good, and his big, capable hands, deft for all their size, groped in an ancient Gladstone bag and emerged with the mangled remains of a heavy steel box and a flat cake of lead.

"The lid of the box is magnetized," he said. He nicked a paper clip at it and it snapped at once to its battered top. "Very highly magnetized. The explosive charge was inside, so that all the killer had to do was clamp it to the underside of the car beneath the driver's seat. Then a piece of cord was run from the box and this lead weight was attached to its other end. As you can see, it's very heavy." He tossed it up in the air. "The weight was balanced on the exhaust pipe of the car. When the-"

Thomas said, "But surely that's impossible? I mean, look at the shape of it."

Maynard chuckled. "It was the right shape when it started," he said. "We found it embedded in a brick." He beamed at them; talking about explosives always made him happy.

"When the car's engine was switched on," he continued, "the vibration shook the lead loose, and the resultant pull on the cord detonated the charge inside. The results of that you've seen for yourselves."

His voice was now a lecturer's, primly impersonal, and Marshall looked at him, astonished. He had been the first to see the body. In the past he'd seen men shot, burned, knifed, battered to death, but he had never in his life seen anything so appalling as the twisted remains of that body. Below the waist it had ceased to exist, and the head had been completely smashed by impact with the windshield of the car. After that there had been the fire… The man had died immediately, but the dismemberment of a human being was so cruel in itself that it had haunted his nightmares for the last two nights. He turned to Thomas.

"Anything you want to say, Doctor?" he asked.

Thomas waited for a count of three before answering, as he always did.

"There is very little I can tell," he said at last. "Obviously he was killed outright by any number of things, all of them lethal. I found a fractured skull, a broken neck, several arteries severed, at least a dozen bones broken, and a steering-wheel rib driven through his heart. No one ever died more quickly."

Thomas turned to Marshall. "How will you prove identification?" he asked.

"Clothes and shoes," Marshall said. "The bits we got were Craig's all right. Hand-made stuff. I've had them identified."

Thomas nodded.

"I see," he said. "Do you need me for anything else?" Marshall said no, and he left.

Maynard explained how the container had been made wider at the top than at the bottom, and the magnetized lid much thinner than the rest of it. In that way the main force of the explosion struck straight up at the driver.

"A little beauty," said Maynard, then added, "the bastard."

Hoskins looked up from his notebook in surprise. He had never before heard Maynard criticize an effective explosion.

"He didn't care who got it, did he?" Maynard asked. "Craig could have had half a dozen kids aboard. Anybody. For all this sod cared, they could all go, just so long as Craig went with them. I know it's stupid to hate in our business, but this time I can't help it."

"What do you make of it?" Marshall asked.

Maynard shrugged. "There you've got me, boy. That's your problem, thank heaven. I've given you the modus operandi, the rest is up to you. Fancy a beer?"

"Yes," said Marshall, "but the chief wants to see me."

"Ah," said Maynard. "I'll be over in the Grapes if you've got time."

Marshall followed him out, knocked on the oak door of the chief constable's room, and went in as soon as he heard the unintelhgible growl from inside.

"Sit down, Inspector," Chief Constable Seddons said, and Marshall sat, with that strange combination of strength and primness that never left him. He and the chief constable fitted perfectly into that bare, aseptic office, and Marshall began to relax without knowing why.

"This Craig business," the chief said. "How's it shaping up?"

Marshall told himl There was no point in evasions and both men knew it. Marshall talked clearly and economically, telling how he had found the body, the shambles of the garage, the continued unconsciousness of Mrs. Craig who, according to Dr. Brady, was abominable. He described the bomb, and how it worked, and his interview with Sir Geoffrey. Then he reported on his progress. Stolidly, in the same economical way, he told the chief that there was no progress to report. Craig had been a man with dozens of acquaintances and no friends, a man who lived for his work, a man whose only private possessions were a handful of snapshots and a judo belt. "You checked on that?"

Marshall nodded. "None of the local judo clubs owns him, sir. Hoskins is looking into it now. He says the black belt's the best there is. And he should know, sir. He's pretty good at it himself." He paused. "I've been flunking, sir. I'd like to get in touch with the Admiralty about his background."