Мистер Наткин смотрел на полицейского с таким удивлением, как будто тот только что сошел с Олимпа.
– Невероятно! – вырвалось у него. – Но где, скажите ради Бога, порядочный горожанин может раздобыть бомбу?
Сержант Смайли покачал головой.
– Сегодня, сэр, это не проблема. У ирландцев, арабов и прочих чужаков полным-полно всякого оружия. Это в дни моей молодости было по-другому, а теперь… Да любой старшекурсник химического факультета – будь у него все необходимое – сотворит вам бомбу за пять минут. Ну, доброй вам ночи, мистер Наткин. Думаю, что больше вас беспокоить не будем.
На следующий день в Сити мистер Наткин зашел в мастерскую Гуссета, где изготовлялись рамки, чтобы забрать фотографию, которую оставлял там на две недели. Он заказал для нее новую рамку и попросил подержать до тех пор, пока не выберет время и не зайдет сам.
Наконец фотография вернулась на столик у камина – свое законное почетное место.
На фотографии были изображены два молодых человека в форме саперного подразделения Королевской армии, которые сидели на корпусе «большого Фрица» – пятитонной немецкой бомбы. В разобранном виде перед ними лежало взрывное устройство. На заднем плане виднелась деревенская церквушка. Один из молодых людей, в форме майора, был худ и долговяз. Рядом с ним сидел упитанный коротышка с очками на кончике носа. Под фотографией стояла подпись:
«Искусным мастерам саперного дела – майору Майку Гэллорану и капралу Сэму Наткину – с благодарностью от жителей Стипл Нортона.
Июль 1943».
Мистер Наткин с гордостью посмотрел на снимок.
– Любому старшекурснику… – фыркнул он. – Скажет тоже!..
USED IN EVIDENCE
'You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you say mil be taken down and may be used in evidence,'
Part of the wording of the official caution used in the British and Irish police forces by the cautioning officer to the suspect.
The big police car slid to a halt by the kerb some fifty feet from where the cordon spanned the street to keep the bystanders back. The driver kept the engine running, the wipers flicking rhythmically across the screen to push away the insistent drizzle. From the rear seat Chief Superintendent William J. Hanley looked forward through the glass to the groups of watchers outside the cordon and the knots of irresolute officials beyond it.
'Stay here,' he told the driver, and prepared to get out. The driver was pleased; the inside of the car was snug and warm and, he reasoned, this was no morning to be walking up and down a slum street in the drifting rain. He nodded and cut the engine.
The precinct police chief slammed the door after him, hunched himself deeper into his dark blue overcoat, and walked purposefully towards the gap in the crowd barrier where a damp police officer watched over those who entered and left the cordoned area. Seeing Hanley he brought up a salute, stepped aside and let him pass through.
Big Bill Hanley had been twenty-seven years a policeman, starting by pounding the cobbled alleys of the Liberties and rising through the ranks to his present status. He had the build for it, over 6 feet and 1 inch of him and built like a truck. Thirty years before, he was rated the best lock forward that ever came out of Athlone County; in his green Irish jersey he had been part of the best rugby football team the country had ever produced, the team that Karl Mullen led to victory three years running in the Triple Crown and that wiped the floor with the English, the Welsh, the Scots and the French. That had not done his promotion chances any harm either, when he joined the force.
He liked the job; he got satisfaction from it, despite the poor pay and the long hours. But every job has its tasks that no one can enjoy, and this morning had brought one of them. An eviction.
For two years, the Dublin city council had been steadily demolishing the rash of tiny, back-to-back, one room up and one room down houses that formed the area known as the Gloucester Diamond.
Why it had ever been called that was a mystery. It had none of the wealth and privilege of the English royal house of Gloucester, nor any of the expensive brilliance of the diamond. Just an industrial slum lying behind the dockland zone on the north shore of the Liffey. Now most of it was flat, its dwellers rehoused in cubic council apartment blocks whose soul-numbing shapes could be seen half a mile away through the drizzle.
But it lay in the heart of Bill Hanley's precinct, so this morning's business was his responsibility, much as he hated it.
The scene between the twin chains of crowd barriers that cordoned the centre section of what had once been Mayo Eoad was as bleak that morning as the November weather. One side of the street was just a field of rubble, where soon the earth-movers would be at work, gouging out fresh foundations for the new shopping complex. The other side was the centre of attention. Up and down for hundreds of feet not a building stood. The whole area was flat as a pancake, the rain gleaming off the slick black tarmac of the new two-acre car park destined to house the vehicles of those who would one day work in the intended office blocks nearby. The entire two acres was fenced off by a 9-foot-high chain-link fence; that is to say, almost the whole two acres.
Right in the centre, facing onto Mayo Road, was one single remaining house, like an old broken stump of tooth in a nice smooth gum. Either side of it the houses had been torn down, and each side of the remaining home was propped up with thick timber beams. All the houses that had once backed onto the sole survivor had also gone and the tarmac tide lapped round the house on three sides like the sea round a lone sandcastle on the beach. It was this house and the frightened old man who sheltered within it that were to be the centre of the morning's action; the focus of entertainment for the expectant groups from the new apartment blocks, who had come to see the last of their former neighbours being evicted.
Bill Hanley walked forward to where, directly opposite the front gate of the lone house, stood the main group of officials. They were all staring at the hovel as if, now that the-moment had finally come, they did not know how to go about it. There was not much to look at. Fronting the pavement was a low brick wall, separating pavement and what purported to be the front garden: no garden at all, just a few feet of tangled weeds. The front door stood to one side of the house, chipped and dented by the numerous stones that had been flung at it. Hanley knew that behind the door would be a yard-square lobby and straight ahead the narrow stairs that led up. To the right of the lobby would be the door to the single sitting room, whose broken, cardboard-stuffed windows flanked the door. Between the two was the passage running to the small, filthy kitchen and the door leading to the yard and the outside privy. The sitting room would have a tiny fireplace, for the chimney running up the side of the house still jutted to the weeping sky. Behind the house, Hanley had seen from the side view, was a back yard wide as the width of the house and 25 feet long. The yard was fringed by a 6-foot-high timber plank fence. Inside the yard, so Hanley had been told by those who had peered over the fence, the bare earth was slick with the droppings of the four speckled hens the old man kept in a hutch at the foot of the yard, up against the back fence. And that was it.