The police laboratories, despite the paucity of Slip-Slider’s remains, were nevertheless able to deduce what kind of explosive had been used, and how it had been detonated. By analyzing where each scrap of wreckage had been stored on board, the forensic men could even tell that the bomb had been planted low down on the port side of the engine block. The blast of the bomb would have driven a gaping hole in Slip-Slider’s bilges through which the cold sea must have recoiled in a torrent, but the blast had also erupted razor shards of shattered fiberglass upward and outward to throw whatever and whoever was in the cockpit into the sea. In the same blinding instant the explosion must have filled Slip-Slider’s cabins with an intolerable pressure that had blown the decks clean off the hull. The boat would have sunk in seconds, and Joanna, Brian Callendar assured me, would have known nothing.
Callendar had come to the house where he had made me a cup of tea before giving me all the grim details of the forensic findings. “It means they’ll bring in the hard men from Scotland Yard”—he paused—“and it means you’re going to be run ragged by the press.”
The reporters were already besieging me. I protected myself as best I could by taking the phone off the hook and barricading myself in the house where I lived off whiskey, despair, and the sandwiches David brought me. The journalists shouted their questions whenever they saw a shadow at the windows, but I ignored them. I had no answers anyway.
The journalists, just like the police, wanted to know who had planted the bomb. For a time the police suspected me, but when the hard men from London searched the boatyard and the house they found nothing incriminating, and nothing to suggest our marriage had not been happy. The police grilled me about my army experiences, but that was of no help to them either, for my time in the army had been spent almost entirely in David’s company playing bone-crunching rugby or going on uselessly strenuous expeditions that had not the slightest military value. David and I had kayaked through the Northwest Passage, dogsledded across Greenland, and climbed allegedly unconquered peaks in the Andes, and all courtesy of the British taxpayer, whose only reward had been press photographs of grinning maniacs with frost-encrusted beards. What I had never done in the army was learn to use explosives.
Nor did I have any motive for destroying Slip-Slider. Yet there were other men who might have had a motive to plant a bomb on board the boat; the same men who had constructed the bomb that had killed my son. “But that bomb,” Inspector Fletcher said, “was your common or garden Provisional IRA Mark One Milk Churn, remotely detonated by radio and stuffed full of Czechoslovak Semtex. Remind me where it happened?”
“Freeduff.” The name still sounded so stupid to me. Freeduff, County Armagh, was the inconspicuous farmlet where Lieutenant Richard Blackburn, commanding his very first patrol, had been blown into gobbets of scorched flesh and shattered bones.
“Freeduff,” Fletcher said in the voice of a man recalling old pleasures, “between Crossmaglen and Cullyhanna. Am I right?”
I gave him a long, meditative look. Inspector Godfrey Fletcher was the hardest of the hard men who had been assigned to investigate Joanna’s murder, and he was evidently no ordinary policeman, but an official thug who moved in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism and political nastiness. He had the narrow face of a predator and eyes that were not nearly so friendly as his manner. The old adage advises that you set a thief to catch a thief, and on that basis Fletcher was probably a man well suited to catching murderous bastards. He was also a man who had clearly enjoyed his time in Northern Ireland. “What were you,” I asked him after a while, “SAS?”
He pretended not to have heard me, lighting a cigarette instead. “But the bomb that killed your wife was not a Mark One Provo Milk Churn, was it?” His gunfighter eyes stared at me through the cigarette smoke. “And the Provos never claimed responsibility for your wife’s death, did they?” It was two weeks after Joanna’s funeral and Fletcher had come to the house to tell me, very grudgingly, that he no longer suspected me of my wife’s murder. But nor, it now seemed, did he think that the Provisional IRA was responsible.
It had been the press who, in the absence of any other culprits, began the speculation that the Provisional IRA had planted the bomb that destroyed Slip-Slider. It was not such a fanciful notion as it might have seemed, for Joanna and I had often loaned the Contessa 32 to British Army crews, who wanted some race experience; Slip-Slider had won her class in the last Fastnet Race with a crew of Green Jackets aboard, and some newspapers surmised that the IRA had assumed an army crew would be sailing the Contessa that Easter weekend.
“But this wasn’t your average IRA bomb,” Fletcher went on. “The Provos are too sophisticated to use mechanical clocks. They like to use silicon-chip timers out of microwaves or VCRs. Using a tick-tock these days is like planting a blackball with a smoking fuse; it’s messy and crude.”
“Maybe it was a splinter group of the IRA?” I was repeating the press speculation, but without any conviction.
“Then why didn’t they claim responsibility? What’s the point of slaughtering an innocent woman for the cause of a New Ireland unless you tell the world of your achievement? Because if you don’t boast about your murders then the Libyans won’t know where to send their money and you’ve merely wasted a bang, and these days the IRA want bigger bucks for their bangs.” Fletcher was standing at the open kitchen door, staring down the long valley toward the restless channel. Joanna had bought the house for that gentle long view toward the sea. Fletcher blew smoke toward the orchard. “No, Mr. Blackburn”—he did not turn round as he spoke—“I don’t reckon your wife died for a New Ireland. Your son did, but his death was an explicable act of political terrorism; your wife’s death was made to look like an IRA follow-up, but it wasn’t. The IRA don’t use toytown bombs anymore. So who does? Who are your enemies, Mr. Blackburn?” He turned from the door and stared into my eyes.
“I don’t have any enemies,” I said.
Fletcher crossed the kitchen in two quick paces and slammed his fist hard on the table. “Who knew about your traditional Easter family reunion?” He waited, but got no answer. “Did someone assume that you’d both be on that boat?” He insisted. “Who tried to kill you and your wife together?” His eyes had the blank cruelty of a hawk’s gaze. I still said nothing, and Fletcher despised me for my silence. “Who scoops the pot if you’re dead, Mr. Blackburn?” He asked in a scornful voice.
“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,” I snapped.
“There must be a fair bit of scratch in your family?” Fletcher’s voice was sour as bilge-water. “Your father was a Harley Street surgeon, wasn’t he? One of the very best, and one of the most expensive. How much did he leave you and your brother? Half a million each?”
“It’s none of your damned business,” I snapped.
“Ah, but it is.” He leaned forward to breathe cigarette fumes into my face. “Anything’s my business, Mr. Blackburn, until I’ve nailed the fucker who killed your wife. Or was it a bitch who did the killing?”
I said nothing.
Fletcher dropped his half-smoked cigarette into my half-drunk cup of tea. “If you won’t help me,” he spoke sourly, “then you’ll probably cop the next bomb yourself, and frankly, Mr. Blackburn, you’ll fucking deserve it unless you tell me where she is.”