‘Spring kite festival. People come from all over the country to show off with stunt kites and what have you. It’s a big deal.’
‘I thought it was just a couple of hundred kids flying their kites. There must be a thousand people here.’ He took out his mobile and started recording the panoramic scene of exodus from the festival site.
‘We usually get two-and-a-half thousand visitors, perhaps fewer this year thanks to our little problem.’
McLusky saw the plume of smoke and the man falling a second before the crack of the explosion reached his ears, like the blast from a large-bore shotgun. People started to converge on the spot halfway up the slope, others hurried their children away. Some waved kites and clothing in the air to attract the attention of the paramedics parked on the road. They didn’t need telling. Having heard the noise they had started their engine and were now already driving on to the grass.
Denkhaus fixed him with an evil stare. ‘McLusky, I hate intuition and hunches and especially hunches that come too late to be of any bloody use. I want to know how you knew!’
McLusky’s mobile told him he had reached the limit of his recording facility. He pocketed it. ‘I didn’t know anything, sir. I don’t even know where I heard about the kite festival before, on the radio perhaps.’ They made their way up the slope, walking fast, following the tracks the ambulance made on the grass. ‘I think we can expect many more devices to go off. He says in his letter something like … can I have it again, sir?’
Denkhaus stopped, glad to catch his breath for a moment, and handed him the note, now protected by a clear evidence bag.
‘Here. Now I will employ my armies. The devices are his soldiers. I think he has a suitcase full of the damn things and he’ll probably dot them all around the city in one go, if he hasn’t already done it. From then on all he has to do is stay at home and watch it all on telly.’
‘Bloody hell.’ Denkhaus took the letter back and stared at it with disgust for a few seconds, then put it away. ‘I know what you’re saying, but you might be wrong there.’
‘How so?’
‘You got us here, didn’t you? You were just not quick enough and you haven’t got a clue why you brought us here. You’re unmethodical, McLusky, that’s your problem. Get yourself organized!’
They had arrived at the site of the explosion. Curious onlookers had formed a tight circle around the paramedics who were tending to a middle-aged man sitting on the grass, a woman and young boy kneeling by his side. Denkhaus waved his ID and bellowed at the civilians. ‘Make your way to the nearest exit unless you’re close relatives of the victim. Get going, this emergency isn’t over. Walk, don’t run, and for God’s sake don’t pick anything up, not even if you find the crown jewels.’
The man doesn’t need a megaphone, McLusky thought. He squatted down by the victim, who drank shakily from a water bottle. ‘How are you feeling, sir? What happened?’
‘I nudged it. It was just back there.’ He nodded his head at the hill behind him.
‘What was?’
‘It was a box of biscuits. I hadn’t seen it before but I thought it might be ours. I had my hands full so I nudged it with the folding chair I was carrying. To see if it was full or empty. It knocked me back off my feet. Completely winded me. Thank God my wife and son had gone ahead.’ The man’s face and hands were peppered with angry red spots where debris from the device had hit him. ‘I mean, I know we were told not to pick anything up but it was instinctive, you know?’
‘Do you remember what kind of biscuits they were?’
‘I don’t know the brand. It had pictures of different sorts on it, what you call it, an assortment.’
McLusky left a sergeant in charge of getting personal details and securing the site and joined Denkhaus who was staring unhappily out across the park and the city beyond.
‘We’ll have to search the entire park again for devices. Possibly all the parks. How many are there, sir?’
‘Too many. We might as well close the entire city. It can’t be done without declaring martial law and imposing a curfew. People will just have to be extra vigilant. I’ll arrange for another press conference but we can’t have people panicking, that’s what the bastard wants to happen.’
‘I get the feeling he wants people to stay quietly at home.’ So he can do what? McLusky had a mental image of a lone skateboarder moving through an empty town on an electric board, unimpeded by people or traffic. John Kerswill’s dream.
‘We don’t have the resources to close and search every park, railway station, bus and public space.’
‘I’m aware of it. We’ve had over five hundred false alarms so far, it seems we’re doing little else but chasing up suspicious packages.’ Each time a car backfired the phone lines got jammed with reports of bomb blasts. People saw bombs everywhere.
The sun disappeared and the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. McLusky cheered up. ‘We did them all a favour closing down the festival, saves them getting soaked. All snug in their cars now.’
Denkhaus grunted and walked off quickly towards his own car. He hated getting wet. ‘You’re in charge. I’ll call a press conference.’
McLusky stood on the knoll as the heavens opened. By the time Forensics turned up every officer in the park was soaked to the skin.
Chapter Fifteen
‘I still can’t get over how quickly you made up your mind. It would have taken me days of thinking about it. And you didn’t even test drive it.’
‘I’ve driven one before.’
Austin had given him a lift to the dealership. After spending half an hour looking at nothing but black cars he had turned around, pointed at an olive green Mazda 323 with excessive mileage and a thirsty engine and bought it.
‘It’s a kind of elimination process. If I look long enough at the wrong stuff then I suddenly find the right stuff.’
‘Does that work with suspects?’
‘Not so far.’
‘Shame.’ Austin rubbed a smoothing hand over the letter on the table to deflate the air bubbles in the evidence bag that protected the paper. He read out loud for the second time. ‘Perhaps This will Shut you Up. I have Warned You. Now I will employ My Armies everywhere. Homes and Churches will be safe but Silence will settle on the Parks and Streets of this City.’
‘I know it by heart, Jane, there’s nothing there, no hidden clues. Photocopy it and get it off to Forensics. Even they should know it’s urgent by now though I expect them to find nothing.’
McLusky drove to Trinity Road, the central police station in St Phillips. At Technical Support he clicked the memory card from his mobile and handed it to a young suntanned technician. ‘See if you can do something with this. I shot some video at the kite festival just as the bomb went off. It’ll be crap quality — do you think you can sharpen it up somehow and stick it on a disk for us?’
‘Yeah, no sweat, we do that all the time. I’ll have a go at it now if you want to wait. Not got him yet, then?’
It was a rhetorical question and McLusky treated it as such. In turn he didn’t ask any questions beginning with ‘How on earth …’ about imaging technology and video enhancing. To him it was pure witchcraft. How you could take a rubbish image and turn it into a clear one was beyond his comprehension. Surely if something wasn’t there it wasn’t there?
But apparently not; in less than twenty minutes the technician was back, handing him his card and a CD in a hard protective case. ‘See how you get on with that. Hope you catch him soon.’
Back in his own office, still cramped with several TV monitors, he slipped the disk into his computer and settled down to watch with a mug of instant coffee and a custard Danish. There was only three minutes of footage. What Technical Support hadn’t managed to fix was the jerkiness of the camera movement. Off screen a tin-voiced superintendent spoke of the kite festival’s popularity. Then the sudden movement of the man falling backwards and the small plume of smoke blowing on the wind. People reacted by moving either away or towards the locus of the incident. Except …