Somewhere under the jumble of clothes and duvet by the side of the mattress his mobile chimed faintly and patiently. He scrabbled around for it, leaning across the girl’s body as he did so, making her stir. At last he found it and answered it. ‘McLusky.’
Rebecca opened her eyes. She gave him a look from sleep-narrowed eyes to go with her brief ironic smile.
The voice at the other end sounded bright and showered and wide-awake. ‘Morning, inspector, it’s Louise Rennie … Chemistry department? Bristol Uni?’
‘Ehm, yes. Morning. Morning, doctor.’ The girl wriggled from under him into an upright position and started clinking through the Pilsener bottles by the side of the bed, lifting each in turn without luck. ‘Have you had a new thought, Dr Rennie?’ He was wide awake now.
‘Yes, you could call it that. I have two tickets for The Duchess of Malfi at the Tobacco Factory for tonight and I wondered if you’d like to come.’
‘Ah. I see. Ehm …’ The girl lit one of his cigarettes and got up. McLusky’s eyes followed her breasts out of the room. ‘Yes, that would be … great. Shakespeare?’ So that’s what he had left her his number for. He lit a cigarette himself and inhaled deeply.
‘No, the other guy. The performance starts at eight. Can you meet me in the cafe at seven?’
‘I’ll do my best. Which cafe?’
‘The one at the Factory, inspector.’
‘Makes sense.’ The flush from the toilet seemed excessively loud. The girl padded back into the room and broke into a cough. McLusky coughed unconvincingly, trying to claim it as his own.
‘You should try and give up smoking. Both of you. See you at seven, inspector.’
He put the phone down and checked the time. Rebecca was dressing. He watched her legs disappear into preruined jeans and her breasts under T-shirt and sweater. The little pang of regret he felt made him wonder if he was likely to see them again.
By the afternoon five hours of meetings, report-sifting and fruitless phone calls had nearly succeeded in driving Rebecca’s breasts from his mind. Now, in stark contrast, he was staring at his least favourite thing, CCTV footage. The CCTV operation for the city centre was being coordinated from a single suite of hi-tech offices. McLusky had spent half an hour there, in an office where recorded incidents could be analysed and copies made, before he decided that he couldn’t concentrate in the place. The subliminal electronic buzz of hundreds of monitors thickened the air around him into an electronic fog and produced a dull headache behind his eyes.
The few staff were helpful but they were also very busy. When he’d arrived and been shown around they’d been in the process of directing police by radio to a fist fight outside a launderette, a car break-in, shoplifters tracked through the centre, a speeding pair of scooters and a group of kids lobbing bottles from recycling bins at each other across a pedestrianized street. On yet another monitor McLusky saw a middle-aged woman, perhaps drunk, perhaps taken ill, lying on the pavement near a newsagent’s. Pedestrians were neatly stepping around her, pretending not to notice.
All the staff here were civilians of course, which was another source of worry. He didn’t want anyone drawing the same conclusions he had until it became inevitable. As soon as he had the copies he had asked for he took the footage back to Albany Road.
At the station he had requested and received three battered TVs and three DVD players and had managed to cram them all into a corner of his tiny office, one balanced on top of the other, and plugged them into the only available socket via an adventurous knot of extensions. Ensconced in his chair and with a notebook beside him he wrote endless, detailed and systematic notes. Having long recognized his woeful inadequacy when it came to paperwork he tended to overcompensate by sifting everything into separate sheets, columns and folders, with large simplistic headings. This would generate piles of papers all with directions at the bottom like ‘cf. DOGWALKER 1’ or ‘see also SECOND NOISE REPORTED’.
The angles on the cameras covering the entrances were shallower and allowed number plates to be read. The time counter helped him to synchronize the footage. Any person walking in or out who could have simply dropped the booby-trapped compact he tracked from camera to camera. Those that walked out he tracked backwards, those that came in he tracked forward. Some people of course merely used the car park as a shortcut but most were coming from or walking to their cars. He then noted down the appearance of the people and the make and age of car and laboriously tracked the vehicle back to when it arrived or left, noting the index number if possible. Nobody however could be observed placing the bomb by the entrance or dropping it, though the camera might not pick up such sleight of hand. The area was just outside the picture, perhaps by less than a yard, he estimated. After two hours of this he reminded himself that he was acting on the assumption that what he had seen in the original footage was indeed Maxine Bendick bending down to pick up the glittering find that later claimed her face. His headache had got steadily worse. Time for a break. He stopped the playback and called the hospital.
Sitting on the sill of the open window he was glad of its unprestigious view over the backs of houses, away from the eyes of punters, colleagues and superiors, because it allowed him to defy the smoking ban. While he was waiting for a doctor at Southmead Hospital to come back on the line there was a knock at the door. It sounded like Austin’s knock but you could never be sure. Just in case it wasn’t he hid his cigarette by balancing it on the window frame behind him. A slight breeze made it roll off and fall into the void.
‘Shit. Come in.’
It was Austin. ‘Shit come in? Charming. Or did you think it was DCI Gaunt? I forget, you haven’t met him yet.’ Seeing that his superior was on the phone the DS sat down. He produced his own cigarettes and lit one with a silver lighter. Not before time, McLusky thought — the man’s addiction had been costing him a fortune.
Austin frowned at the tower of TV sets. ‘Why didn’t you use the computer, you could have had all three on a split screen?’
‘Really? Now he tells me.’ The doctor came back on the line, armed with files and superior advice, no doubt, to refuse his request.
McLusky had expected no less. ‘Dr Thompson, I said interview. I have no intention of interrogating Miss Bendick. She’s a witness and a victim of crime. I only need to ask her a few questions.’
‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid.’
‘One question? I tell you what, doctor. You ask her one question for me and I might not have to interview her at all, how’s that? Would you do that? It might just help stop more cases like Miss Bendick coming through your door.’
A short pause during which McLusky rolled his eyes for Austin’s benefit.
‘I can’t promise you anything. It might depend on the question. She needs rest.’
‘It’s a simple question. Just ask her where she got the powder compact.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘I’ll call you back.’
‘Oh no, I’ll hold.’
‘You’re a suspicious man, inspector.’
Too right. Waiting for people to call back, being abandoned by operators in little-explored corners of the switchboard, phantom messages left with imaginary people and all things ‘in the post’ were part of an officer’s daily round and high on McLusky’s list of spirit-draining nuisances.
He wedged the receiver between ear and shoulder, stretched his legs out along the window sill, folded his arms and turned to Austin. ‘You found nothing, I take it?’
The DS had just returned from supervising a search of Colin Keale’s locker at the distribution depot where the man drove a fork-lift at night. ‘Nothing relating to bomb making. An overall, a newspaper and a vacuum flask that had whisky in it.’
‘Whisky? Mmm. Glenfiddich, by any chance?’