‘You should get a preliminary report sometime this afternoon.’ He hesitated. ‘But yeah.’ The man came over to him, carrying an evidence bag. He held it up for him to examine. It contained a very small piece of metal that could have belonged to some kind of mechanism. ‘The device contained a timer, inspector. They used a wristwatch. A mechanical one works best for this kind of thing. Tick tock, a real ticking time bomb. I’ve come back to see if I can recover more of the pieces. I’m not saying we’ll get it back to work but the more of the pieces we have the greater the chance that Forensics can come up with a make. If it was a new watch then it will probably turn out to have been Russian.’
‘Russian? Why’s that?’
‘Real wind-up watches are relatively expensive but the Russians still make cheap ones you can buy here and there. You would probably not go and buy a precision Swiss watch just to blow it up. So unless you had an old one hanging about you’d probably buy a crap Russian one from a catalogue showroom. It’ll last just long enough to do the job.’
‘I see.’ He looked at his own wristwatch which was a cheap battery job from a catalogue showroom. ‘So if it had a timer that means it wasn’t radio controlled or anything? Not set off remotely by someone watching for his victim to get near it?’
‘That’s correct. It was a very simple device, anyone could have built it. It’ll say so in the report, I’m sure.’
‘So if you’re using a wind-up watch how long in advance can you set the bomb to go off?’
‘Twelve hours. Enough time to get to the other side of the world, inspector.’
Or Turkey. ‘Thanks. Good hunting.’ Or whatever one wished people who hoovered grass for a living. Anyone could have built it? McLusky was sure he wouldn’t know where to start. His understanding of things explosive began and ended with the kind where you put a match to a fuse and retired to a safe distance. He ducked out of the perimeter on the other side. He called Austin on his mobile. ‘I’m in Great George Street. Bring the car. No, your car.’ He smoked two cigarettes before Austin crept up on him in a minute Nissan. Not really a convincing car for a big hairy DS, thought McLusky, even in blue.
The car park at Blaise Castle Estate out in Henbury had plenty of space this cold April lunchtime. The man at the estate office glanced at their IDs and gave them directions without asking what they had come about. They had to walk back along the road they had come and long before they got to the nursery McLusky wished they had taken the car. The signs on the gate declared No Parking and No Public Access. McLusky and Austin weren’t public. They pushed through and walked up between long propagating houses and through an open door into a large shed with a concrete floor. There were wooden bays containing various composts and more empty flowerpots than seemed possible. By a still-steaming kettle stood two young men in green dungarees and green T-shirts, chomping sandwiches.
One of them swallowed down a large mouthful, looked like he regretted it for a second, then challenged them. ‘Help you gentlemen?’
They showed IDs. McLusky looked around. ‘Boss about?’
‘On her lunch break. It’s about the bomb, is it?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘We’re putting in for danger money.’
‘Good thinking. You wouldn’t of course have any idea who would want to blow up a shelter in Brandon Hill?’
‘Not the foggiest, and we’ve been thinking hard.’ He reached up a hand as if to scratch his head but changed his mind. His thin hair was ineptly spiked into a ridge that ran down the centre of his head like a flailed hedge.
The other man spoke with a strong Bristol accent, modified by sandwich. ‘We hope it’s no one with a grudge against the park, since we’re out there all the time, like. We was planting bulbs around there only the other day, all round that shelter.’
‘Well, last October actually.’ The thin-haired gardener gave his colleague a pitying look.
‘A grudge against the park? Or the parks department? Has anyone left under a cloud recently?’
They looked at each other for a split second, seeming to come to an instant agreement on the matter. ‘Yeah, Three Veg did.’
‘Yup, got fired.’
Austin’s brow furrowed. ‘Three veg?’
‘Nickname. His real name’s Tim. He’s a veggie, so at school when others were having meat and two veg he used to ask for three veg. It stuck.’
‘What did he get fired for?’
The first man had at last dispatched his sandwich. ‘What didn’t he? Just about everything.’
The two gardeners slipped into their well-rehearsed double act. ‘Being late.’
‘All the time.’
‘Skiving.’
‘He’d be out there, like, supposed to plant up a bed and he’d be standing by the fence watching the girls instead, leaving all his stuff lying about.’
‘Smoking in the greenhouses.’
‘Borrowing power tools …’
‘Driving the minivan through the park like a maniac.’
‘Oh yeah, that was on his second day here, nearly got fired for that then, didn’t he?’
McLusky had heard enough reminiscences. ‘So he got the sack. When exactly was that?’
‘Last summer. September? Yeah, it was September.’
‘End of September.’
‘You seriously think he’s behind it? Building a bomb? Three Veg couldn’t do it, he hasn’t got the brains.’
Rapid shakes of the head from the first man. ‘Too thick.’
‘Apparently it doesn’t take much brains. And we have to explore every avenue. Does he have a surname?’
Hedgerow Hair nodded his chin at a door in the back. ‘They’ll have that in the office, won’t they?’
They did. Timothy Daws, twenty-eight years of age. An address in Bedminster. The admin worker wasn’t taking a lunch break. She was eating salad from a plastic container at her desk. ‘Yes, we had to let him go in the end. He was charming but a compulsive liar and never did any work. When he did turn up for work at all.’
‘Did he have any redeeming features? Was he mechanically gifted, perhaps?’
‘We thought so at first. He seemed to be so good at repairing things. Machines appeared to be breaking down as soon as he was supposed to take them out on a job. He would then say, Oh, leave it to me, I’ll fix it, and he would, eventually. Only it later turned out there was either never anything wrong with them in the first place or he’d been the one to sabotage them. He’d just sit around smoking, doing nothing. It was another way of delaying the start of any job you gave him.’
McLusky thanked her and walked out the other end between the propagating houses full of row upon row of plants growing in plastic pots. Two more gardeners working at this end looked up from what they were doing and gave him a friendly nod as he passed. One even smiled. People enjoying their work, whatever next? On the way back to the car park he called Albany Road. ‘Have we got the search warrant for Colin Keale yet?’
‘Still waiting.’
‘All right, can you run a name for me? Timothy Daws, as in jackdaw. He got fired by the parks department for being a waste of space.’
‘Won’t be a tick.’ The officer didn’t take long to come back over the phone. ‘Timothy Daws, yup, petty theft and one caution for cannabis possession, nothing recent. Hardly a career criminal, sir.’
‘I don’t care, it’s all we’ve got. I have an address out in Bedminster, wherever that is.’
The DC compared it with the one on the computer. ‘Yes, same address he gave then.’
‘Right. Chase the search warrant.’ He slipped his mobile back in his jacket. ‘We’ll pay Mr Three Veg a little visit.’
Austin drove south and west. ‘Does he look like a candidate for our Bench Bomber to you?’
‘Not really but who does? If he’s a long-term pothead then he could have gone paranoid. Apparently he’s a lazy bastard so I wouldn’t have thought he’d go to the trouble of learning to make bombs. Also, if you wanted to take it out on the parks department surely you’d bomb the parks department.’ McLusky sighed. ‘Unfortunately there’s no “surely” with these nutters. So we’ll go visit.’