Stephen Leather - The Bombmaker

It had a concrete floor and white plastered walls. Along the wall opposite the stairs were shelves lined with climbing equipment, boating gear and camping supplies. A canoe lay upturned on two wooden blocks, a jagged hole in its bottom. In the far corner was a metal trunk. The two men looked at the trunk. Denham went over to it and opened it. The smell was a hundred times worse, and Denham turned his head away, gagging. McKechnie joined him and looked down into the trunk. The body had been wrapped in black garbage bags and had been bent at the waist so that it would fit. A bare foot protruded from one end of the bundle, black and putrescent, the yellowed nails barely hanging on to the flesh.

'Shit,' said McKechnie, his voice muffled by the wet towel.

'Yeah,' said Denham.

McKechnie went over to the shelving, rummaged through a pile of climbing gear and came back with a piton. He stuck the pointed end into the plastic and ripped a jagged hole in it. He stepped back and pressed the towel harder against his face. 'Jesus Christ,' he said.

Denham took a couple of steps back. The stench was overpowering, like meat that had gone bad but much, much worse. It had been a long time since he had been confronted by a corpse, but the smell of rotting flesh was something he'd never forget. He moved towards the trunk again, holding his breath. McKechnie pushed the plastic to the side with the piton, revealing what was left of the face. The flesh had blown up to the size of a football, the skin bluish-green and split in places, the eyes milky and staring. The hair was grey and spiky, the only feature that had anything in common with the photographs he'd seen of Micky Geraghty.

'What do you think?' asked McKechnie.

'Hard to tell,' said Denham. 'But yes, I'd say it's him.' He motioned at the body. 'Take the rest off. Let's see what killed him.'

McKechnie used the piton to tear away the black plastic. The corpse was wearing a denim shirt and corduroy trousers. No shoes or socks. There were two holes in the shirt, and the material was stained with dried blood. McKechnie tore the plastic away from the corpse's left hand. The little finger and the one next to it had been chopped off. McKechnie grimaced.

'So now we know,' said Denham. He reached over and closed the trunk. 'You tidy up here, Harry. I'll phone Patsy with the bad news.'

– «»-«»-«»Andy was pouring herself a cup of water from the cooler when Green-eyes called her name from the door to the meeting room. She took the paper cup with her. Green-eyes was wearing a white sweat-shirt with the sleeves pulled up above her elbows, black ski pants and the ever-present ski mask. On the long table was a black briefcase and a Marks and Spencer carrier bag that Green-eyes had brought with her earlier in the day, when she'd been wearing a pale blue suit. She was holding a videocassette. 'This arrived,' she said, slotting it into the video recorder and switching on the television.

The picture flickered with static, then steadied. It was Katie. It was a short message, barely twenty seconds long, just saying that she was okay and that she wanted to be back home with her mummy and dad. She looked close to tears, and Andy put her hand up to her mouth as she watched. Katie looked much more scared than she'd appeared in the previous video. Her lower lip was quivering and her voice was shaking. 'It's Monday and I want to go home,' she said. The recording ended and the screen was filled with grey static again.

'She's terrified,' said Andy, staring at the static. 'How can you do that to a seven-year-old girl?'

'She's fine,' said Green-eyes. 'That's all you've got to worry about.' She pulled the black briefcase towards her and clicked the locks open.

Andy was still staring at the blank television screen. 'I want to speak to her.'

'You've just seen that she's okay,' said Green-eyes.

Andy turned to face her. 'She said it was Monday. Yesterday. But how do I know it was filmed then? You could have done it last week.'

'For Christ's sake, Andrea. Next time we'll have a copy of that day's paper in the shot, okay? Now come over here.' She turned the open briefcase so that Andy could see the contents. There were four oblong slabs of what looked like bright yellow marzipan, covered in thick, clear plastic. Under the plastic on each block was a white paper label with a black border containing the words EXPLOSIVE PLASTIC SEMTEX-H in capital letters.

Green-eyes took the four blocks out of the briefcase. Underneath were more blocks. Each was about nine by twelve inches, and an inch thick. In all, the briefcase contained sixteen blocks of Semtex.

'Where the hell did you get this from?'

'That's for me to know, Andrea.' She opened the Marks and Spencer carrier bag and took out two bread rolls as Andy examined the explosive. Green-eyes broke one of the rolls in half. Inside were four silver metal tubes, each about three inches long and the thickness of a pencil, with one end crimped around two white wires that had been coiled together. She laid the four tubes on the table, put the remains of the roll in the bag and then crumbled the second one apart. It contained four more tubes.

Andrea picked one of them up. It was a Mark 4 electrical detonator, the type she'd used when she made bombs for the IRA, a lifetime ago. Her hand began to shake, and she put the detonator down on the table. Up until she'd seen the Semtex and the detonators she'd half hoped that Green-eyes wasn't serious about building the bomb. Without the proper detonators and initiator, the fertiliser-aluminium mixture was practically inert, and Andy had been clinging to the possibility that the bomb was being built merely as a threat, in the way that she'd often set bombs in Northern Ireland to tie up the security forces rather than to kill and maim. The contents of the briefcase and the bag brought it home to her that she was building a device that was going to be used.

'They're okay?' Green-eyes asked.

Andy nodded.

'You have to build a bomb for us to use tomorrow. A small one.'

Andy's jaw dropped. 'What?'

'Tomorrow. A small bomb. A test.'

'How small?'

'Big enough to blow up a car, say.'

'Why?'

'You don't have to worry about why, Andrea.'

'Is it to kill someone?'

Green-eyes ignored the question. She went over to the video recorder and popped out the cassette. She held it under Andy's nose for a few seconds, then tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

'Tomorrow. And God help you if it doesn't work. Now get to it.'

Patsy Ellis was sitting at the desk looking over a computer print-out when Liam Denham walked in. 'Good morning, Liam. Sleep well?'

Denham grunted. He'd arrived back in London in the early hours and had spent the rest of the night on a couch in an office on the floor above. Before catching a few hours' sleep he'd telephoned his wife and told her not to expect him home for several days. She'd accepted the news without complaint, though she'd made him promise to keep his cigarette intake to below one packet a day.

One of the three telephones on Patsy's desk rang and she picked up the receiver. She tapped her index finger against her lips as she listened. 'How do you spell that?' she said, picking up a pen and making a note on a pad in front of her. She stood up and banged down the phone. 'Briefing room,' she said. 'We've identified the driver.'

Denham heaved himself up out of his chair and followed her down the corridor. On the way she knocked on several doors and shouted that she wanted everyone in the briefing room. By the time she reached the door there were more than a dozen men and women following in her wake, like chicks in pursuit of a mother hen.

Patsy went over to the whiteboard on which were stuck the photographs of the members of Andrea's active service unit. 'Right, thanks to Chief Inspector Denham we now know who gave up Trevor. An IRA sniper, Micky Geraghty. Someone tortured and killed him several weeks ago, presumably for information about Trevor.'