Further up the quay, at the perimeter of the taped-off area, a silver Porsche was being carefully parked. As the driver approached the police tape he was challenged by a constable and after a short conversation allowed to proceed. McLusky watched him take his time as he picked a route through the harbourside snake pit of hoses, cables and ropes. His hand-made shoes crunched reluctantly over crushed glass and eroded concrete. He was talking on a mobile. ‘Place is a mess. I can see the boat, she’s a goner. It’s a disaster from start to finish. I’m flying into Palma this afternoon, you can kill me then.’
‘Jane, go and ask him what …’ McLusky rolled his eyes at Austin who appeared to have stuffed the entire sandwich into his mouth at once. ‘Forget it.’ He called to the new arrival. ‘Hello. Are you the owner?’
The man walked over before answering. ‘Was. One of them. Nothing much left to own.’
‘She might be worth restoring … not that I know much about boats.’
‘Then what, may I ask, are you doing here?’
McLusky held out his ID for the man to peruse.
The man shrugged: so what? ‘It was arson, I’m told. Have you got someone in custody?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What about the shipwright chap? Wasn’t it him?’
‘We don’t think so. He just happened to be the one who picked up the incendiary device. He’s recovering nicely in hospital, by the way.’
‘Good for him. Meanwhile we are short one motor yacht. I’m going to get the blame for this. There are plenty of yachts for sale in Majorca but, like an idiot … I saw her advertised, liked the style and persuaded my partners. She was hardly seaworthy then. We had her brought up overland from Cardiff last year. They worked like demons, only finished her yesterday.’
‘Why here?’
‘I’m from here. My children live here with their mother. And I wanted to give work to the last surviving boat builders here. Bloody disaster.’
‘She was insured?’
‘Generously. That’s not the point. Might not look it here but in Majorca the summer is well under way. There’s people waiting.’
‘What do you do there?’
‘Financing development. Balearics and southern Spain. I hope you find who did this. Not that it’ll make much difference. I’m flying back to face the music now. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye Mr …’
The man was already walking back to his car and didn’t bother to turn around. ‘Chapman.’
They both watched him blast off, blaring his horn impatiently at an elderly man wheeling a bicycle along the harbour front. Austin rolled the tinfoil wrapping of his sandwich into a ball and flicked it in the direction of the departing Porsche. ‘Cheery chappy, Chapman.’
McLusky didn’t comment. Something had disturbed him this morning and it wasn’t the extremely early appearance at his door of DS Austin with news of a suspicious incendiary. No, the early hours of the morning he had always considered to be the best of the day, still fresh, untainted, at least if you avoided police radio. It was something else that niggled at him now, back of the mind, tip of the tongue. Something he heard, saw or smelled but he couldn’t grasp it. Hopeless. It slipped away like the tail end of a dream, back into his unconscious. He was out of cigarettes, too. He thought better with a cigarette, a walk and a cigarette. ‘Got a ciggie, Jane?’
‘Didn’t I say? I’ve packed it in. As of today. Eve is making me, she was livid when I started again.’
McLusky looked hopeful. ‘So … no doubt you have stocked up on mints, chewing gum and chocolate-covered peanuts then?’
‘No, I’m going cold turkey.’
‘Well, that’s no use to anyone. You’re really not getting the best out of your addiction, DS Austin.’ He hopped off the oil drums. With his mobile phone held at arm’s length he turned through 360 degrees, recording the entire scene, ending with Austin’s glum face. ‘Smile, Jane, think of the money you’ll save. See you back at the station, I’m taking a walk.’
At a newsagent’s McLusky handed over his bank card to pay for two packets of cigarettes. Austin’s fiancee was right. Quite apart from the health risk the damage to your finances was insane. There were people out there earning less per hour than the price of a packet of twenty. But this was not the right time to stress over it. Or the fact that even Extra Lights made him cough like a coal miner in the morning. He would compensate with fresh air, go for a walk, set his brain working, try and retrieve the disappearing strands of thought in his unmethodical mind.
He had simply turned his back on the harbour, intent on exploring a few more streets of his new home, and was pleasantly surprised when he came across a small park. Queen Square with its tree-lined perimeter and its lawn dissected by a star of paths was just what he needed. He would walk its perimeter under the trees and think.
Only when he had walked one length of the square did he allow himself to light the cigarette he’d been craving. Games, they were just games, he had to pack it in for good. When he caught the bastard. The day he caught the bastard he would give up smoking. Just please don’t let it be today.
It promised to be a warm, sunny day yet here in the shade under the trees it was cool and the smells of the nearby river and of early morning lingered. At this time of day there were few people in the park, mainly mothers with children and the elderly. A community support officer on a mountain bike was making the rounds, cycling past him at a leisurely pace. There had to be worse beats than one that included Queen Square in the morning.
Two devices in two days. Phil Warren’s latest article on the bomber had graced the front page of the Post only yesterday. True to what McLusky now recognized as her form she had called the bomber not only a coward but also a twisted loner and a perverted madman who had clearly targeted children when he hid explosives in Easter eggs. Neither the bottle nor the phone would have been planted in response to the article, it would have taken too much time to build them. If the bomber was to react his response was still to come.
The mobile might have been there for days, there was not enough left of it for Forensics to give a verdict on that. The champagne device had clearly been tailored to the occasion. But why the boat? Why include the yacht in his list of targets when all the others had been left where they could be triggered by anybody who found them? The apparently random nature of the attacks suggested a man — surely a man — who hated everybody. Random attacks always meant that the perpetrator was dissociated from real people. The man he was looking for was isolated, a loner, a man for whom other people had no real substance.
Only the yacht was different. How could the yacht offend a man like the bomber? Did it stand for something, symbolize something — luxury, conspicuous consumption? Did all the places and devices have a symbolic value? Or did that only happen on TV, where eventually you found that it all corresponded to some damn poem or Shakespeare play or verses of the Bible? Unfortunately it was difficult to tell what was significant to an unhinged personality until after you had caught him and taken a good look at the hinges. Few murderers had a poetic streak and in his experience the poetry-writing, opera-going, hard-drinking but lovable CID officers who solved such crimes were thin on the ground in the force. Hard-drinking, maybe …
Unhinged, another word Warren had used. As instructed she had also used ‘according to a source close to the investigation’ more than once. So far there had been merciful silence about that from the super’s office since Denkhaus probably assumed Warren had simply made it up. But the bomber would assume no such thing.
He dropped the butt of his cigarette on the ground, refusing to feel guilty. Well, why didn’t they supply ashtrays? The great outdoors was one of the last places you were allowed to smoke after all. For now. His mood hadn’t lifted, far from it. He clawed another cigarette out of the packet. Extra Lights just didn’t work as well as real cigarettes. As he focused his eyes on where he touched the flame from his lighter to the end of the cigarette a blurred movement entered his line of sight. He looked up, refocused. Away to his right beyond the equestrian statue in the centre moved a skateboarder. McLusky stared hard at the small receding figure. Move your legs, let me see you move your legs. The figure didn’t, just glided on in effortless, lazy zigzags. It might be his imagination, might be wishful thinking, but the skateboard looked larger than normal, chunkier. He couldn’t hear an engine but what of it, perhaps the guy had silencers fitted, whatever. He screwed up his eyes as the quickly disappearing figure moved into the shadows under the trees. There it was, the hand holding the control wire — a motorized bloody skateboard. Which way was he going? Left.