Trethowan stood beside them. ‘Both perfectly legal and both registered to Martin Edgeworth,’ he said.
‘I assume all the regular checks were made when Edgeworth applied for his certificate?’ Banks said.
‘Certainly,’ said Trethowan. ‘I’ve verified the documents, and there’s no doubt that Edgeworth was deemed fit to own firearms. No charges or convictions, not even a speeding ticket, and no health issues raised by his doctor. Solid guarantors. All above board.’
‘What did he use the guns for? Hunting?’
‘Competitive shooting, mostly. Targets more than clay pigeons, of course. For clay pigeons you’d generally use a shotgun of some sort.’ He touched the bag with the revolver inside. ‘This baby here is a Taurus 66.357 long-barrelled revolver, using a.357 Magnum FMJ 158 grain bullet. One bullet fired and fragments dug out of the wall of Edgeworth’s cellar.’ He moved on to the AR15. ‘And this daddy, as you know already, is an AR — Armalite Rifle — 15, emasculated for legal use under a firearms certificate in the UK.’
‘Do you think you could stop referring to the weapons in familial terms, please?’ Annie said. ‘I mean, it makes me cringe to hear someone talking about guns as babies and daddies. And “emasculated”? Give us a break.’
Trethowan reddened. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a piece of AFO slang.’
‘And you’re still certain that Edgeworth would have been able to work the bolt fast enough to get off ten shots in under a minute?’ Banks asked.
‘Yes. Easily. There are ten bullets missing from the thirty-round clip of 5.56mm bore ammunition, which qualifies for small-bore calibre designation. But it’s small-bore with full-bore performance, as they say, if it’s loaded with the right ammo. In this case, he used.223 Remington 55 grain bullets. They travel at three thousand feet per second and carry eleven hundred foot-pounds of energy.’
‘More than enough to do the job from that distance, I take it?’
‘More than enough. Especially with the hollow points.’
Annie had wandered away to talk to Stefan Nowak. Banks couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t especially comfortable around firearms himself, though he had been through some basic training. And it did sometimes seem to him that the relish with which some AFOs talked about weapons was more than a little OTT.
The AFO charged with delivering the guns for ballistic examination arrived, signed the necessary papers, put the plastic bags inside a large messenger bag and headed out. Banks couldn’t think of anything else to ask Trethowan, so he made his farewells and they left.
Chief Superintendent Gervaise’s office was set up in a similar way to Banks’s, but everything was bigger, befitting her senior rank, even the conference table they sat around. And the chairs around her conference table were more comfortably padded.
Adrian Moss had joined Banks and Gervaise for a quick briefing. The young MLO was wearing so much black that he might have been going to a funeral, Banks thought. His gelled black hair shone and his perpetual five o’clock shadow and black-rimmed spectacles completed the style. Banks supposed his attire was appropriate for someone who had to face the media at a time like this. Much as he liked to criticise Moss, he didn’t envy him his job today. The poor boy was stressed out enough already, and Banks doubted he had managed to get much sleep lately. There had been too much going on behind the scenes. For a start, the firearms cadre versus emergency services issue hadn’t been resolved yet, and it probably wouldn’t be without the appointment of a special commission and the preparation of a thousand-page report, which would cost the taxpayers a fortune and probably be so ambiguous as to leave all parties scratching their heads as to what to do after they had read it.
Moss crossed his legs and balanced a yellow A4 pad on his knee. He had a press conference coming up soon and was anxious for angles. He could handle the spin himself, but he needed something to work with in the first place, something suitable for spinning.
‘It’s the usual ending to this kind of saga, isn’t it?’ Moss began. ‘Killer mows down a congregation then goes home and tops himself.’
‘Is that what you think happened?’ Banks said.
‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’
‘I think what Superintendent Banks means,’ said Gervaise, ‘is that there could easily have been a number of different outcomes to yesterday’s actions.’
Moss frowned, pen poised. ‘Such as?’
Gervaise flashed Banks a wry smile, as if to tell him he had got himself into this and must get himself out. ‘Alan?’
‘Well,’ Banks said, ‘Edgeworth could easily have gone on a rampage and shot a lot more people before either forcing us to take his life or killing himself when we had him cornered.’
Moss made a few scratches on his pad. ‘But he didn’t, did he?’ he said. ‘I mean, he didn’t get the chance. So we’re golden, aren’t we? We saved lives. It’s win — win.’
Banks took a deep breath. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he said. ‘Apart from one or two minor ticks.’
‘Minor ticks...?’
‘Laura Tindall, Francesca Muriel, Katie Shea, Benjamin Kemp, Charles Kemp. Need I go on? Edgeworth killed five people and wounded four. He put Diana Lofthouse in a wheelchair. And he’s ruined even more lives. Do you think people just return to normal, pick up and carry on, after something like this? Some of them never will. If you ask me, that’s the story the media will be going with, the aftermath, the human story, not how it was a “win — win” situation for us. We did nothing. We got lucky.’
Moss scratched on his pad. ‘I like that,’ he said. ‘ “The human story”. But you’re not being fair to yourself. You did track the killer down.’
‘It was routine police work, a paper trail, and that’s not very exciting to our friends out there. A helicopter and jeep chase over moorland terrain in zero visibility followed by a stand-off and shootout would have made much better copy.’
Moss tapped his pen on his pad and chewed on his bottom lip. A few of his abundant glossy curls were hanging over his creased brow above his glasses. ‘That’s what I was getting around to,’ he said. ‘I mean, when you get right down to it, it’s all rather boring, isn’t it? I mean, as a story.’
‘Not for the victims and their families.’
‘No, I know that. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful or anything. But try to see it from my point of view.’ He gestured towards the window. ‘And theirs. We don’t have much to give them, do we? I mean, the whole gun law business is getting rather predictable, for a start. They’ve just about done that one to death. No pun intended.’
‘None heard,’ said Banks. ‘And since when hasn’t a bit of blood and gore been enough for them?’
‘I don’t mean to be critical, Superintendent,’ said Moss, ‘but I don’t think you fully understand the situation. I mean my situation. The media situation in general. I’m sensing resistance here. You underestimate them. They’re not simply a bunch of children suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Banks, with a questioning sideways glance at Gervaise. ‘They’re not? Do enlighten me, then.’
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic,’ said Moss. ‘We simply see the world in different ways. That’s all. But we do need to be on the same page here.’
‘And how do you see all this?’
‘That there must be another story. A better story. This can’t be the end.’
‘Isn’t it the bridal party they’ll all be writing about?’ Banks asked. ‘That’s where the glamour and tragedy lie. Laura Tindall was a sexy model; Ben Kemp a war hero. Martin Edgeworth was a nobody. A bloody retired dentist, for crying out loud. What are you going to do, dredge up the statistics about how many retired dentists become rampage killers?’