The towel was still damp from his earlier shower and refused to dry him properly. Normal people, real grown-ups, probably always had a stack of freshly laundered fluffy bath towels in the airing cupboard. He was still waiting for the day when he’d wake to find he was grown up and mature, the way others seemed to manage so effortlessly, and discover that he had an airing cupboard.
‘Room service, hello.’
‘Take it into the kitchen, won’t be a sec.’
He dressed quickly. A blow-dryer would come in handy, too, now that his hair was getting quite long. It was already beginning to recede a bit and keeping it longer hid that well.
‘Real cups, as ordered.’ Austin handed back the banknote. ‘And it appears they take a warrant card.’
‘You didn’t ask for it, though.’ McLusky spoke sharply. He disapproved of police officers who solicited free stuff from civilians. Accepting an offer was sometimes the judicious thing to do, asking for it definitely wasn’t.
‘’Course not.’ Austin dismissed it. ‘Quite … minimalist in here. In a cluttered kind of way.’
While they leant against the kitchen counter and drank their cappuccinos McLusky quizzed Austin some more about the area. Downstairs Constable Hanham poured his coffee into the gutter. He hated the stuff but of course no one had thought to ask him what he actually wanted. A simple cup of decent Earl Grey tea is what he would have said, though he doubted you could get such a thing in a foreign shop like that.
Ten minutes later McLusky once more climbed into the back of the patrol car. He hated being driven so much that he could never stop himself from working imaginary brake pedals, which was why he felt it was safer to keep his feet out of sight in the back. Hanham drove off in the opposite direction to the one he himself would have chosen.
The constable knew that the long way round often saved time. McLusky made careful mental notes, taking everything in like a camera as Austin continued to point out the landmarks, Queen’s Road, the Triangle, Browns. Sitting behind Hanham McLusky peered right up a side street and glimpsed a dirty mushroom of smoke growing skywards from among the trees. Half a second later the sound wave of an explosion hit the car like a roll of thunder.
‘What the fuck?’ Hanham flicked on Blues and Twos and cut across traffic, raced up the narrow street. ‘It’s in Brandon Hill, this side of the tower.’ He drove as far as he could towards the park, then braked sharply. All three officers bailed out of the vehicle and ran along the paths, then uphill across the grass towards the source of the explosion. The plume of smoke now had a ball of fire in its centre, licking twenty foot high towards a stand of trees. People were shouting. Hanham on his radio was breathlessly calling for back-up, ambulance and fire brigade even before they all came to a panting halt at the scene.
A boy and a middle-aged woman were lying on the path that wound around the rise. A wooden structure blazed on the other side of it, halfway up the hill crowned by Cabot’s Tower. Debris of the explosion was everywhere. Several people were sitting or standing, nursing cuts and splinters, dazed with shock. Small children were screaming throughout the park, scared by the sudden noise. McLusky noticed different reactions among the people in the park. The cautious were moving away, distressed, or dialling on their mobiles. Others were shouting, rushing towards the scene from all over the park. Some came intending to help, most stopped at a distance they deemed safe, watching. An elderly woman sat hyperventilating on the grass. The teenage boy was wailing, hands clutched to his face, blood dripping from between his fingers. Several civilians were tending to him. The shockwave seemed to have set off every car alarm in the neighbourhood. Hanham ran back to the patrol car for the first aid kit. McLusky knelt by the second prone victim. The woman lay motionless among debris and supermarket shopping on the path. Her face was grey. A little blood trickled from her right ear into the straw of her hair. She looked dead. He pulled off her scarf and felt around for a pulse. It took him a while to detect it. It felt weak to him but despite his job he didn’t consider himself to be an expert in vital signs. He thought of putting her in the recovery position but didn’t like the look of the bleeding ear. What if her skull was fractured?
‘Is she alive?’
He looked up at Austin. ‘Barely, I think.’ He felt helpless, useless, but pushed the feeling back, swallowing it down. ‘What the hell happened here? What was that thing that blew up there?’ He gestured with his head at the smoking fire at the centre of the devastation. He was a stranger in town again, he had no idea what this place ought to look like.
‘Eh? Ehm, it was just some sort of rustic shelter with benches all round. Kids use it for snogging and cider drinking. Tramps sleep in it sometimes. Uniform move them on.’
‘So it was just … wooden? I mean, I can see it was, but there was nothing else to it, nothing in it that could blow up like that? It’s one hell of a blaze. Can you smell petrol?’
Austin nodded grimly. ‘Yeah, that’s not a simple wood fire. But it was just a big wooden shelter on a concrete base. Nothing else to it.’
‘It was a bomb then. Must have been.’ A thin mist of rain began to fall. He looked around him. Constable Hanham was trying to help the howling boy but couldn’t persuade him to move his hands off his face. Austin was circling the burning jumble of timber, shooing away some kids. A young woman had appeared next to McLusky, bending down to the victim. ‘I’m a nurse.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact way, as though unaffected by what had happened, and proceeded to check that the woman’s airways were clear, and covered her body with her coat.
That’s what I should have done, McLusky thought, I’m useless. He could hear the first sirens over the screeching and warbling of the car alarms. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered. People were taking photographs; some had camcorders, every other person appeared to be snapping away on mobiles. He pulled out his own and began to do the same, taking a 360 degree shot of the scene of destruction, confusion, anxiety, curiosity. Where was the bloody ambulance? The first to arrive were a couple of patrol cars at the bottom of the hill. They parked some way off on the grass, knowing that fire and ambulance had to come through soon. Thinking ahead, professional. Next to arrive were the fire engines. By now there wasn’t much of a fire to put out; the drizzle had increased, keeping the flames down.
A constable pointed a fireman in his direction.
‘You in charge here?’
‘For the time being. I’m DI McLusky.’
‘I’m Barrett, senior fire officer.’ He stood next to McLusky and watched his officers deal swiftly and efficiently with the incident, looking after the victims, damping down what was left of the fire. ‘CID? You got here quickly. We usually get to incidents long before you lot. You’d send Uniform to scout first, surely?’
‘We were passing, heard the explosion. It was quite a bang. I’m no expert but I suspect it doesn’t take much to blow up a wooden shelter. Someone made very sure it would go up properly. We could feel the shockwave. Some people got blown over standing twenty yards away.’
‘My guess is some kind of accelerant was used, too. There was no warning?’ There was suspicion in the man’s voice. ‘You weren’t here because you got a call …?’
‘Nothing like that. My DS would have mentioned something if things were likely to go bang in this town.’ My DS. He indicated Austin who was locked in an argument with a tourist about relinquishing the memory card of his camera to him so they could examine the images on it. Camcorder man didn’t look happy. ‘I think I’d have been made aware of any bomb threats, even though it’s my first day here.’
‘I know.’
McLusky widened his eyes at him.
‘It might be your first day but you do keep busy, DI McLusky. You attended the Nunnery Lane incident earlier but then disappeared before I could talk to you. The house will have to be pulled down, by the way. Let us have your report on that as soon as you can. It’s certainly a weird one.’