‘Supermarket depot. He does mainly night shifts. It suits him, he doesn’t have to talk to anyone, just gets orders over the radio and picks stuff up and dumps it on the ramp. That’s his job, that’s all he does. That and growing house plants. Look.’ He indicated a low table near the window. It held a plastic propagator full of tiny pots and trays. Above it hung a grow lamp. ‘He propagates potted plants. Not pot plants. He’s as straight as you and me, inspector.’
Speak for yourself, thought McLusky. ‘When’s he due back?’ He knew already but wanted to hear it from Tilley.
‘This weekend.’
‘Who’d he go with?’ He continued to open drawers without really searching the place.
‘By himself. He’s not overly sociable but he’s no longer the nutter he was a couple of years ago. Colin takes his medication and he stays off the booze, mainly.’
‘Mainly?’
‘Everyone needs a drink from time to time, you know?’
Too right. He squeezed into the kitchen, opened cupboards, cutlery drawer, oven. This didn’t ring any alarm bells at all, he was wasting his time. ‘And what does Colin Keale drink when he does need a drink?’
‘Scotch, I think. I saw a bottle once, but it’s no longer a regular thing, really.’
‘Any particular brand?’
‘I couldn’t say. Glensomething. There’s so many of them. What does that have to do with anything?’
‘Nothing, just idle speculation. Thank you, Mr Tilley.’ He handed him the key. ‘Can we leave you to lock up?’
Back on the pavement he shrugged. ‘Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there but it doesn’t feel right.’
Austin didn’t like the implication. He had been taught to mistrust his feelings and go with the facts. He hoped McLusky wasn’t talking about instinct. Next thing you knew he’d be saying he’d got a hunch. Hunches didn’t go down well in twenty-first-century policing. ‘Could be under the floorboards.’
‘I know, but it ain’t. Maybe it’s the potted plants. Anyone who blows up stuff is obsessed with something, a grudge, an ideology, an idea, a fantasy of some kind. But not Care and Propagation of House Plants, Volume 2, surely? Send someone round the supermarket depot, see if he has a locker there where stuff could be hidden. Though I doubt it very much.’
‘Okay. But we’ll still pick him up when he gets back?’
‘Oh yes. The moment he steps off the plane, Jane.’
Maxine Bendick dashed through the drizzle to her Mini, fumbled with her seatbelt, started the engine and checked her watch. She had twelve minutes to get across to Park Street for her fitness training. It was an idiotic rush to squeeze the lesson into her lunch break at the best of times but when, as it had today, something came up just before she was due to leave, like a client having a lengthy rant about his council tax bill, not that it had anything to do with her, then she would be late for sure. It was only a half-hour slot anyway but the only one that had been available and nothing was going to stop her. The insane traffic might, of course. She felt vaguely guilty for driving such a short distance — from the ‘council services access point’ where she worked to the car park behind the Council House — but she would never manage it in time on foot lugging her gear. Getting from her reserved parking space to the Council House car park wasn’t the real problem either, she was getting good at that. Only finding a space when she got there could sometimes be tricky, even if there weren’t bombs going off. It was a week since the bomb blast. She hoped the police had finished examining the area or it would take her even longer to get to the gym.
Traffic didn’t seem as bad today, moving at a steady snail’s pace. She was even lucky with a parking space and found one close to the exit. This made all the difference. If her parking space was at the ‘good’ end she would take the long way to the gym, cutting through Brandon Hill. It was a longer walk but it was worth it, reminding her that there was life beyond houses and housing. Her new Mini bleeped and blinked as its central locking engaged and Maxine walked off at a brisk pace. The drizzle was turning to rain but she didn’t mind. A glint caught her eye. Something square and shiny was lying on the tarmac close to the exit of the car park. It looked like a powder compact. A young couple were walking towards it. Surely they would claim it? A little girl’s voice inside her shouted No, I saw it first! then the couple had walked past it without noticing. Maxine quickly stooped and picked it up. It was indeed a gold compact. It was quite clean and unscratched, so couldn’t have been lying there long. Not real gold, probably, the metal was a bit too pale for that, though it was satisfyingly heavy. Maxine slipped it into her jacket pocket. There was no time to look at it now. She shrugged her sports bag higher on to her shoulder and hurried towards the park.
‘I was always crap at chemistry.’ McLusky had spoken out loud in the privacy of his empty office though he would happily have admitted it in company. He didn’t understand half of what the report said. He turned to the end of each section and read through the conclusions. More jargon. The Forensic Science Service at Chepstow had worked fast, had worked miracles, in fact. Getting at least some of the evidence from the locus of the blast analysed within a week was lightning speed compared to normal procedure and had only been accomplished with considerable pressure from the ACC.
Usually there was nothing too complicated about these reports but this time he had no idea what firm conclusions he should draw from the make-up of the device.
Joel Kerswill had given a written statement that offered them nothing more than another description of the skateboarder. Elizabeth Howe, the second victim, had abruptly regained consciousness two days after the explosion. Spookily, it had been at the exact hour of the blast, as though she had heard an echo that had at last awoken her. If so, then it had certainly been a mental echo; she had two perforated eardrums. They’d finally been allowed to talk to her yesterday. The interview had been conducted entirely in writing, to spare Ms Howe’s ears. The prognosis for recovery was good.
She remembered sitting on the bench to rest before continuing to carry her meagre shopping home. The next thing she remembered was being lifted up, like in a dream. She couldn’t actually remember hearing the explosion.
No new clues about people or events, nothing about the bomb itself. Not one witness had noticed a container under any of the benches.
This much he did understand from the FSS report: the metal container that had held the explosive device — a tin in which Glenfiddich whisky was sold — had also contained an amount of petrol. The device had been triggered with the help of a simple timer constructed from a Russian-made mechanical wristwatch and a run-of-the-mill three-volt battery. The rest of the report was so much gobbledegook. Very precise gobbledegook, naturally. The FSS prided itself on it, which meant their reports were littered with provisos, approximations and qualifications — probably no smaller than but not exceeding.
In other words, what he wanted was an interpreter. He stuck his head round the door of the CID room. ‘Jane, the university?’
Austin looked up from a pile of painful paperwork and pointed a plastic biro over his shoulder. ‘Yes, Liam. Big thing up the hill, can’t miss it.’
‘I take it they have a chemistry department?’
‘I should think so.’
‘Good. I need help with bomb-making.’
‘Aha. So what did you make of the forensic report?’
‘Oh, I think I’ve cracked it.’ He pulled a face he hoped expressed cheerful disgust and walked off down the corridor.
DS Sorbie was muttering to himself from behind his desk. ‘Cracked yourself.’ The new boy was swanning around the city running after one single crank who let off a firecracker while the rest of them worked on ten case files at the same time and drowned in paperwork and stupid initiatives. The runaway ten-year-old boy had at least been found, albeit half-dead after what looked like a hit and run on the A road leading to the motorway. There’d been more muggings by the scooter-riding muggers. An attempted abduction of a young woman near the harbour and the never-ending string of drug-fuelled burglaries. Perhaps McLusky would do them all a favour and get himself run over again, then normal service could resume. And maybe then they might promote someone around here rather than import inspectors from outside.