A Death of Distinction (8 page)

‘Dex? You mean
Derek,
I suppose? Well, I don't know why you've come here!' she bridled, taking a cigarette from a half-empty pack of Rothman's King Size and snapping a lighter to it. ‘Think I'd have him back, after what he's done?'

‘Any idea where he is?'

‘Should I have?' she countered, dragging on the cigarette with hard, angry little puffs.

‘If
you
don't, I don't know who would.'

‘Why don't you try his mother?'

The two detectives exchanged glances, immediately realizing the mistake that had been made. ‘We should've known you're too young to be his mother, love,' Farrar said, favouring her with one of his knock-'em-in-the-aisles smiles.

She gave him the once-over. Didn't half fancy himself, this one. Though come to that, she might have fancied him, too, in other circumstances. She laughed. ‘What gave you that idea? If that nasty little sod had been mine, I'd have done something about him before he ended up where he did. I'm only his stepmother, thank God.'

‘This was the address he gave his probation officer when he was released – where he said he was living.'

‘What of it? He doesn't have to report no more.'

Kite was looking hard at Josie. He wasn't as baby-faced as she'd thought, even if he did look like he couldn't hardly knock the skin off a rice pudding. Sergeant then, was he? After a moment, she shrugged.

‘Well, he did come here, then. It was his dad let him, not me. Stopped for a bit, and that was enough for all of us, even Barry. He didn't like the discipline and we didn't like him, know what I mean?'

Kite nodded. The picture was clear enough. ‘Where's your husband – Barry, is it?'

‘What d'you want him for? He can't tell you no more than me.'

‘He's Dex's dad, isn't he? He might've told him where he was going.'

‘Pigs might fly! And I don't want you bothering Barry, specially at work. They don't like coppers snooping around down the garage ... Why can't you leave us alone? What d'you want to come bothering us for, just when we've got our lives sorted!'

Taking in the puffy, beflowered three-piece suite, the state-of-the-art music centre, the twenty-seven-inch telly, the frilly Austrian blinds, Farrar said, ‘Down the garage? Which one?'

‘If I told you, you'd know, wouldn't you?'

‘Come on, sweetheart, give us a break.'

‘Don't you sweetheart me!' She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Tell you what, though. I can give you her address – his mother's – yeah, you go and pester her. Not that he'll have gone to that cow if he'd any sense.'

When they'd gone, she picked up and dialled. ‘Barry? Guess who I've just had here. Yeah, they're on to him – what have you two been up to, the pair of you? What? No, I bloody didn't, but I will if they come here again. I'm not letting that little bleeder mess things up for us again, so you'd better be telling me the truth.'

‘Well,' said the major from the army bomb disposal unit, ‘there you are, can't have it clearer than that. All the Provo IRA trademarks, though now we're all friends ...' He shrugged eloquently. ‘Doesn't rule out other subversive organizations, mind, animal liberation weirdos, or even some maverick IRA bugger – somebody who knows what it's all about from the good old days. They knew how to pack a bomb – though clueless, you wouldn't believe it, sometimes, I tell you. If I were you, I'd be looking for somebody with access to several pounds of Super Ajax, Swiss-made detonators and a helluva grudge. And the ability to put it all together in a plastic lunchbox with weedkiller and sugar.'

‘Commercial explosive, hm? And Continental detonators? Not something you buy over the counter.' Mayo looked across the desk at the young man. ‘We're not talking amateurs, then?'

‘Doesn't follow. The stuff's easy enough to get if you've the right sort of friends. And most of the components you can buy anyway from any electrical store. But take it from me, this was no Mickey Mouse box of tricks.'

‘And the know-how?'

‘Elementary chemistry. Plus a lot of care – unless you want to spread yourself all over the ceiling.' He laughed, this clean young man whose everyday business was dealing with death and destruction, who came within a hair's breadth of his own death every time he defused a bomb.

‘So it wasn't simply a warning –?'

‘It was meant to kill, all right. Fixed to the underside of the vehicle, wired up to go off immediately the car was vibrated in any way.' He described the mercury tilt switch which had been used, sensitive to any movement of the car, to the rocking of the suspension when anyone lowered themselves into the driving seat, which would have activated the chain reaction which exploded the bomb.

‘All this from the debris,' Abigail said. ‘Rather you than me.'

‘Piece of cake, this one. You should see some of ‘em.'

He was tall and fair and ruddy, his cropped hair as short as his clipped speech. His smile was bright as a toothpaste ad, as white as his certainties. He adjusted his black beret to the correct straight line above his eyebrows and left them without any room for doubt.

Nearly everyone was already there in the incident room – the team assigned to the inquiry, around thirty men and women – constables, three sergeants and two inspectors. The hum of conversation died, computer screens were abandoned as Mayo took up his position facing them, the window behind him thrown open in a vain effort to clear the air of the cigarette smoke that rose to the ceiling and hung in a carcinogenous pall. The gesture failed to make any impression on the serious smokers. Mayo called the room to order.

‘Right, let's see what we've got, then.'

Six-thirty in the evening of day two of the investigation. Not a lot achieved as yet, but the initial turmoil settling down into ordered chaos. Not a lot of hope that much
would
be achieved quickly on this one. Plenty of enthusiasm, though. Nobody liked the idea of a murder, especially a cold-blooded bombing that could rip apart flesh and tissue, wipe somebody off the face of the earth in a split second, and they were all out to get the bastard who'd done it.

‘That feminist animal liberation group in Hurstfield we had trouble with some time since,' Mayo said, after repeating what the major had told him. ‘Ted? You were looking into that, weren't you?'

‘Disbanded, after we nabbed the ringleaders.' This was Carmody, long face lugubrious, plodding and patient as ever. ‘And not started up again, as far as I can find out.'

‘Let's hope so. But by the very nature of the crime we can't overlook terrorist involvement, local or otherwise. In the absence of any sort of claim, it's beginning to look remote. But we need a result on this one, quick, always bearing in mind it could be the start of a series of attacks directed against specific targets. There's been a lot of call lately for stiffer sentencing for young offenders, for instance, we all know that, and this might have been some loony sort of opposition to it. So regarding Conyhall, how're we doing on the interviewing there. Inspector Moon?'

‘Still going on. Every inmate's being questioned, all the prison officers, and the civilian staff. Any recent releases will be seen, plus any earlier ones, if any look like being worth checking on. Especially Derek Davis, when we find him, known to have made specific, personal threats against the governor.'

‘Davis. Yes, but he's a long way from being the only one who felt he'd a score to settle.'

Though it had to be said, that of all those so far interviewed, nobody had evinced a particular hatred of Jack Lilburne. Not that there hadn't been a few who had the obvious if unexpressed wish to see off
all
persons of authority – the filth, judges, magistrates, screws in general. But shock, genuine or otherwise, had been expressed at the attack on the governor.

‘The general consensus of opinion among the Young Offenders' Institution population,' Mayo said drily, ‘seems to be that he was “all right”. Which I suppose means he was probably held in fairly high esteem. We can't take it for granted, though. And this brings me to the next thing – that from now on, we concentrate on Lilburne himself ...'

‘Sir,' Jenny Platt put in diffidently, her face pink under her curly brown hair. Mayo always expected her to put her hand up before speaking out at these meetings, which was odd, because she was neither shy nor incompetent; on the contrary, though young, she was one of his best officers. ‘What about that scrap of paper, sir? The one we found in Lilburne's breast pocket?'

‘Glad you mentioned that, Jenny. I was coming to it later, but we can just as well talk about it now.'

Scattered among the macabre bits of Lilburne's person had been shreds of clothing, and at the bottom of what had once been the breast pocket of his suit had been found a scrap of crumpled paper, folded and creased, as though it had been pushed down by his wallet. It could have been there some time and was probably of no importance now, though presumably it had meant something to Jack Lilburne when he put it there in the first place. All the same, it had been subjected to the usual tests. It comprised the last few lines of a page of typing – typed, not produced on a daisy wheel, dot-matrix, bubble-jet or laser printer, which was of itself significant. In this age of computers, typewriters were fast becoming as obsolete as LPs and treadle sewing machines. It wasn't even typed on an electric typewriter.

‘Anything else, Dave?'

Dexter, the Scenes-of-Crime sergeant, never overoptimistic, said economically, ‘It was a very old portable, manual Olympia 66. Flaw in the alignment, and the shift lock doesn't depress properly so that the caps are above the line. Several worn or damaged keys – distinctive, if we find the original to compare it with. The paper was good quality typing paper, eighty-gramme bond.'

The typing had read:

...what you said. You might at least see me. I'll be in the coffee shop at the Hurstfield Post House at eleven on November the 20th, if you can bring yourself to admit that I'm right, though I don't expect ...

The page ended at that point, and a question mark had been pencilled in the margin, on the bottom line. ‘For Lilburne to check his business diary, to see whether he was free?' Mayo asked.

‘At eleven o'clock on November the twentieth, according to his secretary, Lilburne was with his area manager,' answered Kite, on the ball, as usual. ‘Had lunch with him and was with him until half past two. But we don't know how long that paper had been in Lilburne's pocket, of course. Might have been November the twentieth the previous year.'

Mayo acknowledged this was possible. ‘It was obviously a personal rather than a business letter, and it's not much, but there's an aggrieved tone about it that does indicate perhaps everything in the garden wasn't smelling of roses – which brings me to what I was going to say: that from now on, we concentrate on Lilburne's personal life. I want everything we can get on him – and I mean everything. Right from where he was born to how often he changed his socks. Talk to people, see what they thought of him. Go through his past with a tooth comb. See what he did before he came to Conyhall. Dig up the dirt, if any. Everything so far indicates that Jack Lilburne was a well-respected and well-liked man, with an apparently blameless life, but nobody's that perfect. There must have been something.'

Bridie O'Sullivan woke when the alarm went off in the next bedroom. It was still dark, and she pulled the bedclothes up round her ears and turned over to sleep again. But the noise as he clumped about, getting dressed, stomping down the stairs in his Doc Martens, prevented her. She reached out to switch the light on and look at the clock. Half past five. Jesus, the middle of the night! His car, parked in the road outside, revved up, the roar split the silence. What in the name of God was he doing, going out at that time? Most mornings, she couldn't get him out of bed till noon.

But Bridie had long since learned to put disrupting thoughts about Dex to the back of her mind. She'd done everything she could for him since he entered his teenage years, tried pleading with him, threatening, reasoning, belting him round the ear ... she'd spent hours of her life in police stations and magistrates' courts with him ... and it'd got neither of them anywhere, except to exhaust and make an old hag of her. Dex was grown up now and she couldn't be responsible for him any more. He came and he went, more secretive than he'd ever been, he was tight lipped about his affairs, but she knew he mixed with a right lot of villains. Money came from time to time and Bridie no longer asked where from.

The other four kids were grown up as well and though Tara and her boyfriend were still with her, occupying the back room, and Tara already pregnant with her first, Bridie had her own life that she was determined to lead. Now that
he'd
upped and left her for that Josie and her two kids – and much good would that do any of them! – there was still time to try and recapture some of the youth that had passed her by since leaving County Kerry to look for better things ... she was only forty-three, for God's sake, and though she sometimes felt nearer sixty, she knew she didn't look it. Sure, she'd put on a bit of weight, but her troubles hadn't yet robbed her of her abundant black hair and white skin and her blue, black-lashed eyes. There was still time to be Bridie O'Sullivan again, the name she'd been baptized, Bridget Philomena Mary O'Sullivan, devil take Mrs Barry Davis.

She stretched her legs blissfully to the cool corners of the bed that was hers alone, luxuriating in hitherto undreamed of freedom. No more cooking him the tripe and onions that made her stomach heave – nor having to tart herself up to go down to the club or the pub with him, whether she felt like it or no. No watching him becoming roaring drunk, either, and getting beaten nearly senseless when they got home. Best of all was this stretching herself out in a bed she didn't have to share, unless she wanted to, knowing that her body was all her own. Without lying awake afterwards, sleepless, sinfully praying there wouldn't be yet another pregnancy.