Candy’s hysterical sobbing finally subsided. She sniffed heavily to staunch her tears, following her mother’s gaze towards Seven Dials.
‘M-mum, who’s that?’
Now a solitary figure had appeared from behind the vehicles and was walking steadily towards them. As he neared she could see that he wore a helmet and visor and what appeared to be a flak jacket over police-blue clothing. In one hand he carried a black metal object that resembled a crude sort of shotgun from which a line of cable trailed back to the Range-Rover; his other hand held a multijointed length of angle iron.
He crossed deliberately to them and stopped, dropping one of his loads and tilting up his visor with his free hand.
‘Afternoon, ladies.’ The voice was unbelievably calm and the accent unmistakably Scottish; his shrewd eyes smiled with easy reassurance. ‘Are either of you hurt?’
Casey shook her head. ‘Just a few cuts and bruises, I think and shock.’
‘Aye.’ He nodded in sympathy. ‘Well, we’ll soon have you out of here. Guess you two lassies really are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, I can’t let you walk back to Seven Dials because if that is a car bomb down there, it’s almost certainly on a timer. That puts us in the crucial danger period when we’d normally leave it well alone. But we’ve got you here and other buildings in Neal Street haven’t yet been evacuated.’ He tried the emergency exit behind them, but it was firmly barred. He grimaced, then inspected the shallow brick arch in which they were sheltering. ‘Och, you’ll be okay here if you huddle tight in the corner. There’s no glass to fall on you and that’s the biggest danger.’
‘Are you the bomb-disposal man?’ Candy asked incredulously.
He nodded. ‘Aye, Jock Murray, I’m an Explosives Officer with the Met.’
‘You’re going up to the car?’ Casey asked.
‘That’s my job,’ he answered unhurriedly. ‘And I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. I’ve got to check out the car, there’s something in the front seat footwell. If it is a bomb then I’ve got some equipment here that can deal with the timer unit.’ He lifted up the disrupter which looked like a crude sort of shotgun fitted to a multijointed length of metal. ‘I’ll need to break a window to get at the TPU — sorry, the timer and power unit just in case they’ve wired the courtesy lights. When I’ve positioned my kit, I’ll join you here while I radio my partner to carry out the controlled explosion. Bet you’ve heard that phrase before.’ Again the blue eyes smiled. ‘And we can all go home for tea — or something stronger — and you can forget all about this. Okay?’
Candy nodded eagerly and her mother shared her sense of relief, thankful the man had taken the trouble to soothe their fears. He made it all seem so normal and routine.
‘Five or ten minutes at most,’ he said and snapped down his visor.
Then he was gone, walking steadily towards the car, loaded with his bits of gadgetry, the cable trailing behind him.
Casey made her daughter crouch in the corner of the archway, while she positioned her own body as a shield. After a few moments, curiosity overcame her and she looked cautiously round the vertical brick line until one eye could see the Expo peering through the driver’s window of the car. Presumably he was attempting to confirm the policeman’s report of the device’s location. She saw him raise the spring-loaded centrepunch to the side window before she instinctively drew back to safety.
A short, sharp crack echoed down the deserted street.
It was followed by an expectant silence, the intensity of her concentration blotting out the extraneous noise of more emergency service vehicles arriving in Seven Dials. She was aware only of the sound of rainwater gurgling down a nearby drain and the rising tom-tom thud of her own heartbeat.
Seconds dragged by like hours. Any sense of real time was lost.
Again she was tempted and moved towards the edge of the arch, finding the indentation of mortar between two lines of bricks from which to see.
The Expo was picking carefully away at the spider’s web of frosted glass, then reaching in his hand.
Just then the car exploded.
Instinctively Casey threw herself over her daughter, her mind’s eye filled with the vision of that split second when the vehicle blew apart. The bursting white star of the blast. A fleeting impression of distorted metal panels spiralling skyward like bats taking flight from hell’s inferno. The earth-shaking roar and the sudden shower of warm blood amid the drizzling rain. The abrupt and stunning silence that followed was ended as something heavy landed just feet from the archway where they sheltered. Its force of impact buried the object in the cobbles. An axle, a gearbox or even the engine? It was impossible to tell from the burnt and tortured shape. Instantaneously the air was filled with flying debris and glass, clattering and shattering all along the street.
Slowly, grudgingly, a final blanket of silence smothered the wrecked street. Casey eased herself from her daughter’s shivering body and forced herself to look towards the car.
The scorched banners of the shopping complex hung like tattered flags at the height of battle; below them, having shifted several feet, was the flaming, mangled framework of the car.
There was no sign of Jock Murray.
She had scarcely time to absorb the awful sight of devastation — burning shop fronts, hundreds of shattered windows and the sky filled with floating papers sucked out of surrounding offices before the deserted street was suddenly filled with people from the emergency services. Paramedics and policemen were everywhere.
The young constable returned with an ambulance woman who quickly draped space blankets around the shoulders of both Casey and her daughter. There were words of sympathy and reassurance, helping hands and sad, gentle smiles.
Slowly the small group retraced their steps over the debris-strewn cobbles of Shorts Gardens to Seven Dials. Newly arrived ambulances and police cars were parked, bright and white beside the blackened hulks of those vehicles caught in the earlier blast. Even now wreckage still hissed and sizzled in the fine rain, such had been the heat of the explosion.
‘Casey!’
It was Eddie Mercs, threading his way anxiously past stretcher bearing paramedics and policemen who were helping their less seriously injured colleagues from the scene.
‘Eddie, thank God!’ she gasped, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek. ‘I thought you and Hal had been caught in all this.’
He gave her an embarrassed hug. ‘I might have been but for that silly bugger Hal. Wanted to get a shot of the controlled explosion, so we slipped the cordon. It saved our lives.’ As he stepped back from her she saw the haunted look in his eyes. ‘It was you and Candy I thought were goners. Some young copper said a bird with an American accent was trapped down there with her daughter. I thought it might be you.’
She pulled a tight smile. ‘Then I guess this is the luckiest day of both our lives.’
‘So you saw what happened at the car?’
‘I saw.’
‘What happened to the Expo?’
She looked at Mercs and tried to find the words. But they stuck in her throat.
He understood, nodding grimly as he surveyed the chaos around them. ‘I’ve never known anything like this in all my years.’
There was a sudden flash of light to one side of her and she jumped, her nerves frayed. She saw then that it was Hal, using a zoom lens to photograph a teenage girl being lifted onto a stretcher. The blast had ripped away most of her clothing and rain pattered on her damp, blood-drained flesh until the blanket was drawn over her.
Hal turned, saw Casey and steered her to one side. He kept his voice low, so that Candy could not hear. ‘I’m afraid that’s your daughter’s friend.’