McLusky turned off Park Street into the university hinterland and amused himself by trying to rip the exhaust off the Polo by bouncing it over the ambitious speed humps. After much cruising about he found a parking space at hikable distance from the chemistry teaching laboratories and started marching towards them while dialling the number Tony Hayes at the front desk had found for him. He was put through to the science department and talked to three different people until he found someone who might be able to help him.
‘And is there anybody I could talk to today, perhaps?’
‘I’ll try Dr Rennie for you, see if she’s in.’ Dr Rennie was and might fit the inspector in sometime late afternoon. ‘You’re here already? Hang on, inspector, I’ll ask her again …’
McLusky ghosted through empty, brightly lit corridors until he found the right place.
‘Do you always make appointments this way? You must have a lot of wasted journeys.’
‘Surprisingly few, actually.’
Dr Rennie didn’t offer to shake hands as she held open the glass door of the laboratory to him. Under her open lab coat she was wearing a slate-grey knee-length skirt and an ash-grey roll-neck top. She knew how to throw intimidating glances over fashionably narrow spectacles. ‘Sit down, inspector.’ She indicated a chair at a desk that faced the glass wall separating lab and corridor. Not a private room of study but one where results were shared, discussed, analysed. The place didn’t smell of anything much. McLusky could even make out a faint trace of the doctor’s dark perfume. There was only one other person in the airy room, a thin, prematurely balding man endlessly ferrying trays of small containers from long white desks in this room into a windowless store room on the far side of the teaching laboratory. McLusky thought he detected a faint asthmatic wheeze each time he walked past.
‘What is it you need help with?’
McLusky handed over the slim file he had brought. ‘I got this report from Forensics in Chepstow. What I want to know is — ’
She interrupted his flow with a shake of her head. ‘Let me read it first, then ask your questions. That way I can read it without bias.’
She really was a scientist then. ‘Sure, doc.’
Dr Louise Rennie made herself more comfortable in her chair and started reading. Every time she turned a page she also returned imaginary strands of her fine blonde hair behind her ears with an unconscious gesture of one hand which made him believe that her severely short haircut was a recent development. There was a fan humming somewhere and the wheezy lab rat clinked and padded to and fro, eyeing them with irritation at each passing. Yet it was quiet enough in the room for him to hear the swish of her tights when she crossed, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. He noticed her skirt riding up a few inches above her knee and she noticed him noticing and sighed. She was a very fast reader. ‘Yes, that’s all quite straightforward.’
‘Well, I’m sure it is, really.’ Rennie probably thought he was an idiot for not understanding it but he hadn’t touched a chemistry book since school, and even then reluctantly. ‘I was wondering though if you, as a chemist and being local and … being a chemist, if you could tell me …’ He was making a hash of this for some reason. ‘Tell me what you think. What kind of person would use those chemicals to build a bomb like that? How easy would it be? That sort of thing.’
‘That sort of thing.’ She gave him a quick smile. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
‘Yes please.’ It was the blueness of her eyes, he decided. Same blue as Laura’s. Laura, who had had enough. Who had dumped him while he was in hospital recovering from having been run over in the line of duty. Laura, for whom ‘getting himself run over’ had been the last straw. As soon as he’d been definitely recovering, as soon as she heard him try the first feeble joke about getting a job as a sleeping policeman, she had decided it was safe to go. Police officers needed police officers’ wives, she’d told him, and sorry but she knew she would never make one of those.
‘Okay, then concentrate, inspector. Potassium nitrate, sulphur, charcoal, surely you must remember that much from school?’
‘I was rubbish at science.’
‘History, then.’
‘What’s potassium — ’ he lent across to read — ‘nitrate?’
‘Potassium nitrate is saltpetre.’ She prompted her slow pupil. ‘Saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal …’
‘Oh, that’s gunpowder.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Good old black powder, inspector.’
‘So we’re not talking fertilizer bomb, plastic explosives or dynamite.’
‘We’re talking cannon, musket, firecracker, rocket. It says here that it was pure, industrial grade, so wasn’t home-made from stuff you scrape off a urinal wall and mix with barbecue charcoal, though that can be done if you have enough chaps peeing long enough against a wall. Can’t say I’d fancy that route either.’
‘So unless it’s someone licensed to fire historical weapons that require gunpowder then this is someone who bought a lot of fireworks, took them apart and then filled his container with the gunpowder? So it could be kids, after all.’
‘Kids with a bit of pocket money, yes. That amount of gunpowder would require quite a few fireworks.’
‘But probably not enough to arouse suspicion if you bought them over a period of time or at different outlets. Enough to kill …’ McLusky knew this already but was thinking aloud now.
‘Oh, certainly. Anyone too close could have been killed by the shrapnel or burnt to a frazzle when the petrol in the container caught. It’s just as it said in the paper, it was a miracle no one died.’
‘Burnt to a frazzle, is that a scientific term?’
‘Absolutely. And an apt description of what would have happened had someone been sitting on the bench under which the device exploded.’
‘Though if you wanted to make sure to kill and maim lots of people you would stuff the thing with nails etc.’
‘Yes. My guess is this was designed to make a big bang and look spectacular.’
‘It certainly did that, it sent up a huge black cloud.’ A smoke signal. ‘Could still just be vandalism then.’
‘Yet whoever did it clearly didn’t care that people might get killed, maimed and burnt or they wouldn’t have left it where they did.’
‘Yes. The technical police term for those is arseholes.’
‘The psychology department is in a different building, inspector.’ Dr Rennie pushed the report towards him.
McLusky rolled it up like a newspaper, then patted his pockets for a card. ‘I was going to leave you my card but I haven’t had time to get any printed yet. I’m new in town.’ He spotted a cube of notepaper on the desk and pulled it towards himself, then found a pen in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a heavy brushed-steel biro he didn’t remember buying. Nice, though. ‘I’ll leave you my numbers.’ He scribbled down office and mobile numbers, hoping he’d got them right.
‘What are you leaving them for, inspector?’
McLusky had no idea. He shrugged. ‘Just in case.’
‘I see.’ She rose, the interview terminated.
He thanked her, nodded at the lab rat, who ignored him, and left.
Once outside again it took him a moment to remember where he had left the Polo. Mallzheimer’s they called it now when you couldn’t remember where you’d parked your car. Fortunately his stood out by dint of being old, ugly and a shade of white no manufacturer had used for twenty years. He wondered just how this piece of junk had survived to be a police vehicle in the twenty-first century. He turned on his airwave radio and it sprang to life with urgent calls. McLusky answered it and everything changed.