McLusky finished the Danish, licked his fingers and wiped them on his jeans but they remained faintly sticky. He closely read all the reports and notes and got a mental picture of people moving through the park; the skateboarder, woman and child, beer-drinking type, snogging couple, a sprinkling of tourists; Elizabeth Howe and Joel Kerswill walking past each other in different directions. Then the bang. He imagined it from above, watching a silent explosion as from a hovering balloon, saw himself, Austin and Constable Hanham run towards the scene. Too late, it was all too late. McLusky saw it in his mind as though he was there, hovering. He had been there and he had been useless. It unfolded in front of his eyes like a movie scene, shot from high above the trees, and he wished he could simply play the film backwards until a figure would walk up, reach for the bomb, put it back into the bag … Because there would be a bag, of course, it would also be quite heavy. Perhaps it had been left inside the bag and that had been destroyed by the blast …
Impatiently he shuffled the papers into a messy pile and pushed his chair back on its castors. How was he supposed to draw a bead on this idiot from these bits of paper? They were out there, somewhere, either kids reading about their own prank in the Evening Post or a malicious crank gloating over the column inches he had been given. Far less likely was an inept assassin analysing what went wrong, planning his next move. Since when did they go around assassinating kids and ex-postmistresses? Post … postal workers … mail. No, it didn’t fire his synapses. All he had was Colin Keale, a known bomb-maker, in Turkey, a retired woman and a kid wanting to be a gardener.
McLusky grabbed his jacket and made for the bathroom down the corridor where he washed the stickiness off his hands, then he clattered down the stairs and out into the thin April light. He never found it easy to grasp a case while locked up inside an office, especially one as dispiriting as the one they had found for him at Albany Road. If you wanted to do policing you had to be out in the street and he didn’t even know most of the streets in this city. As a police officer you had to do more than just know them, you had to own the streets and feel in your bones that you did. My city, my streets, my patch.
It looked like a good-enough patch, though there was a chill wind blowing through the narrow lanes of the Old Town. The endless procession of traffic snarled like giant knotted ropes up and down the streets as he walked in the vague direction of the river. Cars, vans, lorries, pedestrians, taxies, minibuses, cyclists, motorized rickshaws and of course scooters squeezed through the unquiet heart of the city. Scooters were everywhere now. They seemed to be the new weapon of choice for many commuters and they were being bought, ridden, crashed and stolen everywhere.
Eventually he found himself walking near a ruined church in a convoluted bit of park. He walked purposefully on into a busy area of tall Georgian buildings. He squeezed through a crowded food market in Corn Street, keeping a sharp lookout. He had planned to enter the first cafe he found but had already dismissed the first two as unlikely candidates for the best cappuccino in town which was what he was looking for. In McLusky’s opinion there really was no point in drinking imitation coffee. Find the best and stick to it. It should only take me a year, he thought, there were cafes and restaurants and takeaway coffee places every few yards. He abhorred drinks in Styrofoam cups and hence avoided the takeaways. The chances that a barista first brewed the finest coffee in town then poured it into plastic cups were anyway frankly remote. Eventually he simply picked a small cafe called Cat’s Cradle where a table had just become free. He ordered a large cappuccino from the frizzy-haired girl behind the counter and sat on a cold chrome chair at a cold steel table by the window. He watched the people passing in the narrow lane. At this time of day there were mostly women in the streets, he noticed, and the place was busy. The city attracted a fair number of tourists even this early in the season. Museums, art collections, the science park and historic ships, both real and replica, in the old harbour seemed to be the main attraction.
As the girl set the enormous cup of froth in front of him a loud bang outside made her jump and sharply draw in breath. McLusky tried to reassure her. ‘Just someone dropping stuff into an empty skip.’ He had caught a glimpse of the battered yellow mini-skip at the end of the lane earlier.
The girl relaxed her shoulders. ‘Well, after what happened yesterday you can’t help thinking. Another one could go off any time, couldn’t it?’
‘Is that what you think? That there’ll be another one?’
‘I don’t know, do I? But it’s scary, isn’t it, if someone blows up stupid things like a pavilion. On the tube you’d expect a bomb, but if they blow up stuff like that then anything could explode next. I never thought it would come here.’
‘I don’t think it has. I don’t think it was a terror bomb.’
‘Well, if it makes people terrified then I think it is.’
The girl had a point. As she left to serve other customers he tasted his coffee. His scale of coffee-rating only had three levels — ‘awful’, ‘drinkable’ and ‘the best’. This one was just about drinkable.
It did however have the desired effect of sharpening his senses. As he continued on his erratic march across town he took everything in precisely, filing away into his memory intersections, back streets, alleys and steps, possible shortcuts. He looked keenly, not like a tourist, but like someone taking possession of a new car, a new house, a new lover. Everything interested him from street furniture to the location of the banks and the number of CCTV cameras. His street instincts were good today and eventually he found himself at the western end of Brandon Hill without having consulted the A-Z in his jacket pocket once. The park was still closed to the public and all entrances were guarded by extremely bored uniformed police. McLusky showed his ID and ducked under the tape. He avoided the locus of the explosion and took a circuitous route to the top of the hill dominated by a hundred-foot tower built from pink sandstone. He climbed the narrow winding stone steps that led him breathlessly to the top. From here he had views across the city in all directions but what interested him lay directly below. It wasn’t exactly Central Park but for a fingertip search it was big enough. There was a large children’s play area, plenty of trees, a pond. The entire area had been combed. There was no separate parks police so Avon and Somerset had provided enough manpower to make sure there were no more devices hidden in the grounds. Suspicious items had of course been found. Two had been blown up in controlled explosions by Royal Engineers; both had been duds. One turned out to be an old dried-up can of yacht varnish. The other had been a rucksack of an Italian tourist, already reported lost. Inside, among other possessions, were his camera and his passport, both now vaporized.
He clattered back down the ancient steps and approached the locus of the explosion. An inner circle had been taped off here, covering the area of scattered debris. A lone CSI technician wearing a coverall was still or again going over the scene, this time with a metal detector. He looked up, annoyed at seeing him approach. ‘Can you stay beyond that case, please?’ He pointed to an aluminium case standing on the path.
McLusky stopped dutifully by the case and brandished his ID. ‘DI McLusky.’
‘Makes no difference, I’m afraid.’
‘Point taken. Anything in particular you’re looking for today?’