Falling More Slowly (13 page)

Colin Keale was going to do no such thing. At this very moment he was looking out from his window seat at the duvet of cloud obscuring his view of the Mediterranean. His departure from Dalaman had been delayed by two hours. But that didn’t worry Keale. What worried him was whether or not he was going to get the contents of his holdall through British customs and what would happen to him if he didn’t.

‘Didn’t you think to check before we set off?’

Austin rolled his eyes. ‘I was going to but I got distracted by the whisky thing. Airport police should have let us know really, they’re the ones tracking him. Are we going back to Albany or are we waiting?’

‘God no, we’ll wait.’ Shortcut or not, under no circumstances did he want to do the journey three more times. ‘And since it was you who got distracted by the whisky thing you can distract me with a cappuccino thing.’

They installed themselves in one of the cafés in the arrivals lounge, but not before McLusky had colourfully expressed his displeasure at not having been informed of the delay to the airport police sergeant supposedly in charge of picking up Keale.

When Colin Keale at last arrived he simply couldn’t believe it. How had they known? They hadn’t even looked inside his bag, just scooped him up in customs and frog-marched him out through a side door where these two CID clowns were waiting, and he knew CID clowns when he saw them.

McLusky put his ID away. ‘You know why we are here?’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’ Keale looked tired and deflated. Apart from his nose, which had caught too much sun, he looked pale. He hadn’t gone to Turkey to sunbathe, that seemed obvious.

McLusky was surprised but never looked a gift horse in the mouth until he had got it home. ‘In that case, Colin Keale, I’m arresting you for causing explosions, attempted murder, causing actual bodily harm …’

‘Wa-wa-wait!’

He didn’t let himself be interrupted and finished the caution: ‘… something which you later rely upon in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’

The man looked incredulous. ‘No, I fucking don’t.’

‘Well, we can talk about it down the station, Mr Keale.’

Which is what they had done now for the last hour in this depressingly neutral interview room at Albany Road. Spread out on the table stood part of the contents of Colin Keale’s holdall, the reason, he had assumed, for his arrest. There were several plastic nets and paper bags full of what had at first looked to McLusky like onions and shrivelled potatoes, and a carrier bag stuffed with packets of plant seeds, some of them in little brown envelopes with Turkish handwriting on them. And a litre bottle of whisky. It wasn’t Glenfiddich. None of this looked like a major breakthrough to the inspector.

‘I suppose this contains Glenmorangie too?’ He produced the thermos flask from a carrier but thought he already knew the answer.

‘Where the hell did you get … did you break into my locker at work?’ Keale was brimming with righteous anger but struggled to keep it in check, in view of the contraband on show on the table in front of him. So he had been stupid once and built some pipe bombs. They’d been glorified fire crackers really, just something to piss people off with. Now they were talking about blowing people up. And he hadn’t even been in the country. He had made one mistake, one error of judgement, and from here to eternity they were going to arrest him every time a car misfired in the city. He
hadn’t been well, had gone through a period of mental instability, you might say. He was better now but of course to the police it had to be him if some bastard started blowing up people. He hadn’t really wanted to hurt anyone, he just wanted to make them look stupid. What a fucking mistake that had been. ‘Yes, yes, it’s Glenmorangie. I suppose you told my employers and lost me my job as well now? That’s great. That’s dandy. It wasn’t easy getting any sort of job with my history. And you’ve no idea how cold it is in those bloody warehouses in winter. A couple of tots get me through the night shift.’

Austin had brought in a photocopy of a leaflet produced by the Plant Health and Seed Inspectorate. McLusky read it. He was getting bored with all this. They’d been over Keale’s movements on the day before the explosion countless times. He cited his neighbour as an alibi and McLusky had little doubt that it would check out. The man was just a plant nut. The things on the table between them were bulbs and corms, he wasn’t sure where the difference lay, and there were enough seeds in this one carrier bag alone to keep a garden centre going. He hadn’t brought in anything illegal, he swore it, just far too much, he admitted it. Everything was so cheap there. He wasn’t doing any harm, was he?

McLusky checked his watch. He was already over an hour late, the play had started a while ago and he had no idea if Dr Rennie had got the messages he had left for her.

And now, since he had whisked Keale away before his bags had been checked at customs, he had more or less helped the nutter smuggle these things into the country. He didn’t feel much sympathy for Keale. The man was a creased, slightly greasy-looking type. Perhaps it was the plane journey that had shrivelled him or maybe it was finding himself back inside an interview room at Albany. He was just another slightly strange, unhappy man who liked growing stuff in a basement. What did it matter? This was all a waste of time.

‘Right, you can go. But don’t leave town, as they say, we might want to talk to you again.’

Keale crossed his arms in front of his chest. ‘What about my bulbs and seeds though?’

‘None of these are …’ McLusky picked up some of the shrivelled-looking things. ‘None of these are dangerous? Or endangered and what have you?’

‘No, as I told you, I just went a bit overboard.’

‘Well, then pack them up and get out of here.’

Keale sprang into action. In less than a minute he had cleared the treasure into his holdall and rushed away. In his eagerness to be out of there he left his duty-free whisky behind.

Back in his office McLusky found a place for the litre bottle of Glenmorangie in the bottom of his desk, making a mental note to get a couple of glasses from the canteen.

A fine drizzle began to darken the pavement as he waited for his taxi.

On the other side of the river in the Knowle West district of the city Frank Dudden was pissing in the street between two parked cars while shouting at the
bastards
in the George and Dragon behind him. ‘Fascist wankers! If you won’t even let me piss in your fucking stinking toilet then I’m pissing right here!’ He half turned to look at the pub from which he had just been evicted and splashed urine against the back of a car, over his shoes and one knee as he swayed backwards. ‘Fuck.’ He buttoned himself up, wiped his hands on his trousers and steadied himself.
Wankers
, all of them. As he passed the pub he aimed a kick at the door through which he had been propelled by the landlord. His kick glanced off the slick woodwork and hurt the side of his foot. ‘Fascists!’ Dudden steadied himself against the wall before steering an approximate course down the pavement. First they sold you the drink then they told you you’d had too much. What was the world coming to when
a man couldn’t even get pissed in peace to drown his sorrows? What was so bad about that? It was any decent and honest Englishman’s right to get rat-arsed if his girlfriend of seven – seven! – years ran off with his month’s takings. Which, okay, he should have banked earlier. Still. Running off with it. Without him. Because of one bloody scuffle. And to Spain! Toremo-fucking-linos! Just how tacky was that?

Dudden reached his car at the street corner and stopped to focus on the object standing on its roof. ‘What the fuck?’ A can of Special Brew. An unopened can of Special Brew. You’re hallucinating now, Frank, because you’re thirsty. He looked around him. There were people walking on the other side of the street, cars driving by, but nobody in the immediate vicinity. Well, if it was standing on his car he’d fucking have it anyway. He reached across and picked it up. Heavy. It really was full, unopened. ‘Well, thank you, very thoughtful of you, whoever you are, Mr Special Brew delivery person.’ He sniffed, hawked and spat viscous, slow-travelling mucus between his feet. Having fumbled the car door open he let himself fall behind the wheel and pulled the door shut. ‘Manna from fucking heaven. No offence.’ He tilted the ring-pull up with the long nail of his index finger and pulled.

The confined explosion knocked Frank Dudden against the roof while separating him from his left hand and most of his genitals. Sprays of blood from his multiple injuries blinded the ruined remains of the windows. His lungs had been crushed empty by the force of the blast. By the time Dudden managed to suck up enough breath to scream he was already too weak to do so. Instead, a pink bubble escaped from his mouth and popped while his heart pumped his blood into the upholstery.

The play wouldn’t finish for ages yet. He wasn’t really dressed to mix with a theatre crowd either, though the
Tobacco Factory didn’t look all that posh. Like many cultural venues in the city a theatre had found a home in one of the many rundown commercial Victorian buildings that had once served the busy port on the river Avon. Cigarettes were now made in China, no doubt. He wondered if one day Chinese tobacco factories would turn into fashionable theatre venues.

Webster, so that’s who the play was by. He studied the poster behind the glass door. One of those ancient plays performed in modern dress, presumably to show how relevant it was to the present. Or perhaps because it saved money on the costumes? He probably would have hated it anyway. Two people stood outside, smoking, twelve feet apart, having nothing in common but their craving. He entered the lobby. The place was quiet. It had been immaculately restored and looked modern and cheerful. McLusky hated the nursery school of architecture. The man behind the reception desk barely registered him.

‘Where’s the café?’

‘Upstairs next to the auditorium.’

Bare brick walls, blond wood tables, medieval music. Three bar staff oversaw a practically empty room, probably waiting for the interval crush. He registered with a sigh that the only thing on draught was lager and ordered a bottle of Guinness, then corrected himself. ‘Make it two.’ He’d just remembered how small those bottles were, they got smaller too as he got older. ‘What time’s the interval?’

The barman checked his watch, pulled a face. ‘Ten minutes.’

‘Will there be a crush?’

‘Oh yes, stand well back.’

Only two of the tables were occupied, by couples talking in low voices, not noticing him. McLusky took a table as far away from the bar as possible from where he could still keep an eye on the door, and emptied the first bottle without bothering to pour it, then took more time over the second one. He was relieved to see that one of the men at
the tables was also wearing jeans and he relaxed a little. Laura had been keen on the theatre, though he could only remember having gone with her twice. He had enjoyed it, but it all seemed a bit of an effort, mainly the dressing-up part. This was okay.

There was no mistaking the moment the interval started. A wave of voices and footsteps approached and poured through the door, breaking against the bar. Dr Louise Rennie was among the first. She received instant attention from the barman and signalled to McLusky that she’d get him another drink, seemingly taking his presence here for granted.

‘I didn’t get any messages.’ She added another bottle of Guinness to his collection and took a sip of her orange juice.

‘I’m sorry. I called the uni. They said they’d pass it on.’

‘I’m sure I’ll find a note in my pigeonhole tomorrow. Today’s my day off. It really doesn’t matter. It’s not a good production and I would have been embarrassed having dragged you out to see it. Were you busy catching the bench bomber?’

‘Is that really what people are calling him?’

‘It’s what they call him in the papers. Why, what do you call him?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Though I can imagine. Can you talk about it? I mean the case.’

‘Some of it.’

‘Is the new explosion, the poor woman with the powder compact, is that related? Is it the same guy who did that?’

‘I think so, though so far there’s no evidence to support that theory. It just seems unlikely that two people in the same city are planting bombs at the same time. Forensics may be able to confirm that it’s the same perpetrator but I’m pretty certain anyway.’

‘But the bombs were very different. That’s what the papers said, anyway.’

‘They were. It was a different type of explosion. The bomb was much smaller, obviously. And it didn’t have a timer, it was set off when the compact was opened.’

‘So the first one was a time bomb? That wasn’t in the papers.’

‘Keep it to yourself. I shouldn’t have told you that. We need to keep back details so we can weed out the cranks and attention seekers claiming responsibility. We’ve already had several cheerful souls on the phone.’

‘But how did the woman get hold of it? Was it her own compact that someone filled with explosives?’

McLusky hesitated. ‘That’s … one of the things I can’t tell you.’

Louise Rennie looked away over his shoulder at nothing, pondering the answer. ‘I see the implications, I think. If it wasn’t hers then … Things could get interesting.’

McLusky went through a series of helpless facial expressions that signalled, ‘Yes, you’re right, but I’m not saying anything.’

‘And the bomb was much, much smaller. Was it the same type of explosive?’

‘There’s no word yet. But what did the most damage to the victim was the tongue of flame that shot from the device. It set her face on fire.’

‘That might not have been the intention. It might just not have worked properly.’

‘That’s always possible.’ This was like still being at work, only with the addition of beer and beauty.

They both reached for their glasses and drank. ‘What are you suddenly smiling about, inspector?’

‘Well, doctor, I was thinking that this is a most peculiar topic of conversation for a date.’