Falling More Slowly (12 page)

It was while he swept through a few side streets to relieve the monotony that the radio came to life. They no longer crackled (though from time to time they stopped working for no reason) but the controller still sounded reassuringly like she had a bad case of hay fever. Street robbery reported in Kensington Hill. Four suspects on two blue scooters leaving the scene along Hollywood Road going south.

Sorbie slowed down. ‘Hey, that’s us, Hollywood’s just behind us. They’ll come this way any second.’

‘I’m not so sure. Quick, do a U-ee! They might feel like a burger after a good mugging. We can always turn again.’ She steadied herself against the dashboard and gave their position to the controller. ‘Was the victim hurt?’

‘Yes, victim is male, in his thirties, collapsed with head wound, ambulance en route, ETA four minutes. The victim is receiving first aid from a taxi driver who is a trained first-aider. A passing couple who made the call saw the scooters leave in your direction.’

‘Get shifting, Jack. Looks like this one put up a fight for you.’

‘Bastards.’ He performed a ragged U-turn using the entire width of the road, the pavement and a bit of roadside shrubbery. It took him no more than thirty seconds to get to the bottom of the hill. There was no sign of any scooters. Sorbie bullied his way up the hill, scanning the road, his mirrors.

‘Damn, they could be miles away, those damn things can squeeze through any traffic too. Keep going.’

‘If we do meet them, do we try and stop them?’

‘We’ll follow.’

Seconds later they approached a narrow side street. It spat out two blue scooters. Sorbie knew this was the genuine article, he had always known he would know. Two scooters, four muggers; black clothes, black trainers, black full-face helmets. Only they were going the wrong way.

‘Rats. I was half-right, anyway. Turn round. Let’s get ’em. Make a noise.’

‘It’ll only make them split up.’

‘I know, Jack, but it’s in the rule book.’ She gave their call sign to the controller. ‘In pursuit of four suspects, possibly male, on two blue scooters travelling west on Bristol Hill, index number …’ She gave the number of the closest scooter. Sorbie brought their plain unit closer to the rear of the nearest scooter before turning on Blues and Twos. Blue light strobed under the grille of the bonnet and the siren howled.

Riders and passengers turned around and the scooters swayed, then picked up a bit of speed. It was a moment they had discussed many times. A single police unit would never persuade them to stop. It would take at least two
units to have any chance of cutting off even one, after which they would probably abandon the scooters and run. If by then they had a helicopter up they should be able to apprehend them. Only it hadn’t worked the last time a patrol had caught a glimpse of them. They’d lost them on the ground and the helicopter had circled the area and found nothing.

Sorbie knew this pursuit could only go two ways and he was certain he already knew how it would end. If it went on long enough they might crash or they would disappear down an alley where he couldn’t follow. He had also discussed the possibility of ‘nudging’ them off, as he had delicately put it to Fairfield, but the inspector wouldn’t hear of it. Sorbie had met Australian police on a visit to Sydney and had admired their attitude. Over there suspects were ‘crims’ and crims got what they deserved. There was no time to pursue this favourite gripe of his, however. The front scooter was signalling left to alert his partner behind him and both scooters turned side by side, slicing across the inside lane and turning down a side street. A startled car driver slammed on his brakes, blocking Sorbie’s path.

‘Whose side are you on, blockhead?’ Sorbie cranked the wheel and took a lot of pavement in cornering around the vehicle. It only cost him a few seconds but it had put the entire length of a street between him and the scooters. They were cornering again. Sorbie shot after them.

Fairfield pointed ahead. ‘They’re going down there, that’s a dead end.’

‘It is for us but not for them. There’s a pedestrian entrance into the supermarket car park, they’ll go through there. We’ll have to go round. We’ve lost them.’ Sorbie drove on without slowing but turned the siren off until he needed it to cut across the next two junctions, then turned it off again. It might relax the riders if they thought they had lost them. He doubted it would. They were too well organized not to have an escape route planned in advance.
Having circled the supermarket he slowed in the middle of the junction long enough to avoid colliding with a greengrocer’s van, then sped north.

Fairfield, who had kept up a commentary on the pursuit to the controller, asked if any units were in the area and was told there were none on that side of town. Several had been drawn off to help with a multiple RTA on the motorway, which kept the helicopter busy as well.

‘Are we packing it in?’ Sorbie asked, still overtaking vehicles at speed. They had come full circle, once more on the Bath Road.

Fairfield’s voice was gritty with frustration. ‘Carry on past Mitchell’s place. You never know, we might get lucky.’ Minutes later the lock-ups flew past her window, dark and deserted. ‘All right, cut the lights and drive me towards my coffee machine, Jack. I’m seriously pissed off now.’

Chris Reed loved computers. He loved everything about them. And especially the net. It was the most liberating weapon unwittingly given into the hands of the ordinary man, and now it was unstoppable. It brought together like-minded people into supportive communities that could be fostered and nurtured into global movements. The establishment could never monitor them all, there were too many of them, too many sites, too many users. Computers helped keep in touch, organize action. Computers gave you ideas. And they cost next to nothing. This one had come from a skip, like most of the things in his room in fact, and it was okay. It was ancient and had less memory than a middle-aged pothead but it did most things, albeit very slowly.

The printer on the other hand was a pain in the arse. Reed cleared another paper jam. The print on his home-made leaflets was too pale and a bit stripy, not at all the stark-looking warning he had been aiming for. But they’d get the message.

He could only do a few cars at a time. Of the five students in this house all but Vicky were totally apathetic. A couple of them had come on the Saturday Traffic Protest once and that was it. Direct action wasn’t their style. Any action really. They didn’t even bother to vote. As far as he could see they were all at uni so they could one day become part of the establishment and add their own 4×4s to the madness and consume until the planet was dead.

He left the printer chewing on the leaflets and went and knocked on Vicky’s door. Loud, synthetic dance music thumped on the other side. He knocked harder.

The music blasted him as Vicky at last opened the door. ‘Oh, hi.’ She went back to piling her hair into a mess on top of her head in front of a narrow length of mirror glass, giving a grunt of frustration when the arrangement snaked apart. She started all over again. As she lifted her arms her short dress rode up high enough to gave him a glimpse of black knickers.

‘You’re wearing a dress?’

‘Yeah. Look all right?’

She’d forgotten. Obvious. ‘Not very practical.’

‘That always depends.’ She could see Chris in the mirror. He was so scruffy. Someone should take the man in hand. For a mature student he was all right really. He had some valid ideas, stuff to say. But it got boring very quickly. Chris the one-trick pony. ‘I’m going out tonight. We’re meeting at the Watershed.’

He crossed the room to the mini system and turned down the moronic music. ‘We were going to do some cars tonight. You said you’d come.’

‘No, don’t do that, it gets me in the mood.’ She turned it up again and returned to her mirror. ‘I must have forgotten. Next time. I’ll come with you next time. Who else is going anyway?’ She asked purely for something to say, she really wasn’t in the mood for Chris tonight and she knew there’d be no one else. In theory Chris’s raids were quite a laugh, in practice they were cold and yucky.

‘It’s just us.’ He knew she wouldn’t change her mind now, she had her make-up done and everything, but he wouldn’t let her off so easily.

‘Sorry, we could do it tomorrow night, what’s wrong with tomorrow?’

‘I’ll do it by myself then. Won’t be able to do many cars but at least it’s a start. Then we can do some more tomorrow.’

‘Oh no, just remembered, I can’t tomorrow, I’m going up to see my parents for a couple of days, aren’t I? Dad’s birthday, they sent me a train ticket.’

He left her room without a word and slammed the door behind him, regretting it instantly. He couldn’t afford to alienate the girl. But how were they ever going to make a difference if dancing and birthdays took precedence over saving the planet? He found lots of support for what he had to say on the net, in the forums and chat rooms, but actually getting stuff off the ground yourself was a lot harder. He hadn’t managed to find many recruits and of the few he did find, only Vicky was left to help him. When she felt like it. Ah well, he’d do it tonight and he’d do it by himself.

Tiny, tiny hairs. Backlit by the weak morning light that modelled the contours of the girl’s stomach. There had to be thousands of little downy hairs and he liked them. From this vantage point – his head resting on her thigh – he could see some of them moving in his breath. The pierced belly button was, on close inspection, not an improvement on the original design. During their lovemaking he’d been scared of catching his hair on it, ripping it out by accident. It was quite safe, Rebecca had told him. Didn’t he like it? No, no, it looked fine. A tiny enamelled daisy. He touched it now with his middle finger, waggled it about a bit. It made him shiver. Rebecca remained fast asleep. Or pretended to be fast asleep, sometimes just as good.

Why couldn’t they stick to earrings? Earrings were all right, much nicer in fact. Was it a sign he was slipping into ‘young middle age’? Was that why he’d chatted up the barmaid in the first place, to reassure himself that everything was still there, everything was just as it was before Laura?

The two-bar heater from the junk shop had been on all night while they slept and the room was unnaturally warm. The girl had kicked away the duvet after their last, lazy lovemaking. McLusky propped himself up on one elbow and studied her body: the hollow of her stomach, her taut flanks, her breasts unbothered by gravity, her long neck curved away from him, her exactly shoulder-length blonde hair, the perfect ovals of her nostrils.

He had enjoyed her body but images of Laura had constantly intruded, offering themselves for comparison. Sight, touch, smell, energy and size, everything was different. No better or worse, just different and somehow vaguely irritating, not exciting and energizing as it should have been. But these tiny hairs he liked.

Somewhere under the jumble of clothes and duvet by the side of the mattress his mobile chimed faintly and patiently. He scrabbled around for it, leaning across the girl’s body as he did so, making her stir. At last he found it and answered it. ‘McLusky.’

Rebecca opened her eyes. She gave him a look from sleep-narrowed eyes to go with her brief ironic smile.

The voice at the other end sounded bright and showered and wide-awake. ‘Morning, inspector, it’s Louise Rennie … Chemistry department? Bristol Uni?’

‘Ehm, yes. Morning. Morning, doctor.’ The girl wriggled from under him into an upright position and started clinking through the Pilsener bottles by the side of the bed, lifting each in turn without luck. ‘Have you had a new thought, Dr Rennie?’ He was wide awake now.

‘Yes, you could call it that. I have two tickets for
The
Duchess of Malfi
at the Tobacco Factory for tonight and I wondered if you’d like to come.’

‘Ah. I see. Ehm …’ The girl lit one of his cigarettes and got up. McLusky’s eyes followed her breasts out of the room. ‘Yes, that would be … great. Shakespeare?’ So that’s what he had left her his number for. He lit a cigarette himself and inhaled deeply.

‘No, the other guy. The performance starts at eight. Can you meet me in the café at seven?’

‘I’ll do my best. Which café?’

‘The one at the Factory, inspector.’

‘Makes sense.’ The flush from the toilet seemed excessively loud. The girl padded back into the room and broke into a cough. McLusky coughed unconvincingly, trying to claim it as his own.

‘You should try and give up smoking. Both of you. See you at seven, inspector.’

He put the phone down and checked the time. Rebecca was dressing. He watched her legs disappear into preruined jeans and her breasts under T-shirt and sweater. The little pang of regret he felt made him wonder if he was likely to see them again.

By the afternoon five hours of meetings, report-sifting and fruitless phone calls had nearly succeeded in driving Rebecca’s breasts from his mind. Now, in stark contrast, he was staring at his least favourite thing, CCTV footage. The CCTV operation for the city centre was being coordinated from a single suite of hi-tech offices. McLusky had spent half an hour there, in an office where recorded incidents could be analysed and copies made, before he decided that he couldn’t concentrate in the place. The subliminal electronic buzz of hundreds of monitors thickened the air around him into an electronic fog and produced a dull headache behind his eyes.

The few staff were helpful but they were also very busy. When he’d arrived and been shown around they’d been in the process of directing police by radio to a fist fight outside a launderette, a car break-in, shoplifters tracked through the centre, a speeding pair of scooters and a group of kids lobbing bottles from recycling bins at each other across a pedestrianized street. On yet another monitor McLusky saw a middle-aged woman, perhaps drunk, perhaps taken ill, lying on the pavement near a newsagent’s. Pedestrians were neatly stepping around her, pretending not to notice.

All the staff here were civilians of course, which was another source of worry. He didn’t want anyone drawing the same conclusions he had until it became inevitable. As soon as he had the copies he had asked for he took the footage back to Albany Road.

At the station he had requested and received three battered TVs and three DVD players and had managed to cram them all into a corner of his tiny office, one balanced on top of the other, and plugged them into the only available socket via an adventurous knot of extensions. Ensconced in his chair and with a notebook beside him he wrote endless, detailed and systematic notes. Having long recognized his woeful inadequacy when it came to paperwork he tended to overcompensate by sifting everything into separate sheets, columns and folders, with large simplistic headings. This would generate piles of papers all with directions at the bottom like ‘cf. DOGWALKER 1’ or ‘see also SECOND NOISE REPORTED’.

The angles on the cameras covering the entrances were shallower and allowed number plates to be read. The time counter helped him to synchronize the footage. Any person walking in or out who could have simply dropped the booby-trapped compact he tracked from camera to camera. Those that walked out he tracked backwards, those that came in he tracked forward. Some people of course merely used the car park as a shortcut but most were coming from or walking to their cars. He then noted down the appearance of the people and the make and age of car and laboriously tracked the vehicle back to when it arrived or left, noting the index number if possible. Nobody however could be observed placing the bomb by the entrance or dropping it, though the camera might not pick up such sleight of hand. The area was just outside the picture, perhaps by less than a yard, he estimated. After two hours of this he reminded himself that he was acting on the assumption that what he had seen in the original footage was indeed Maxine Bendick bending down to pick up the glittering find that later claimed her face. His headache had got steadily worse. Time for a break. He stopped the playback and called the hospital.

Sitting on the sill of the open window he was glad of its unprestigious view over the backs of houses, away from
the eyes of punters, colleagues and superiors, because it allowed him to defy the smoking ban. While he was waiting for a doctor at Southmead Hospital to come back on the line there was a knock at the door. It sounded like Austin’s knock but you could never be sure. Just in case it wasn’t he hid his cigarette by balancing it on the window frame behind him. A slight breeze made it roll off and fall into the void.

‘Shit. Come in.’

It was Austin. ‘Shit come in? Charming. Or did you think it was DCI Gaunt? I forget, you haven’t met him yet.’ Seeing that his superior was on the phone the DS sat down. He produced his own cigarettes and lit one with a silver lighter. Not before time, McLusky thought – the man’s addiction had been costing him a fortune.

Austin frowned at the tower of TV sets. ‘Why didn’t you use the computer, you could have had all three on a split screen?’

‘Really? Now he tells me.’ The doctor came back on the line, armed with files and superior advice, no doubt, to refuse his request.

McLusky had expected no less. ‘Dr Thompson, I said interview. I have no intention of
interrogating
Miss Bendick. She’s a witness and a victim of crime. I only need to ask her a few questions.’

‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid.’

‘One question? I tell you what, doctor.
You
ask her one question for me and I might not have to interview her at all, how’s that? Would you do that? It might just help stop more cases like Miss Bendick coming through your door.’

A short pause during which McLusky rolled his eyes for Austin’s benefit.

‘I can’t promise you anything. It might depend on the question. She needs rest.’

‘It’s a simple question. Just ask her where she got the powder compact.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Nothing else.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

‘Oh no, I’ll hold.’

‘You’re a suspicious man, inspector.’

Too right. Waiting for people to call back, being abandoned by operators in little-explored corners of the switchboard, phantom messages left with imaginary people and all things ‘in the post’ were part of an officer’s daily round and high on McLusky’s list of spirit-draining nuisances.

He wedged the receiver between ear and shoulder, stretched his legs out along the window sill, folded his arms and turned to Austin. ‘You found nothing, I take it?’

The DS had just returned from supervising a search of Colin Keale’s locker at the distribution depot where the man drove a fork-lift at night. ‘Nothing relating to bomb making. An overall, a newspaper and a vacuum flask that had whisky in it.’

‘Whisky? Mmm. Glenfiddich, by any chance?’

‘I don’t have your nose, Liam. I could tell it was whisky but not which one. We’ll send it off for analysis of course.’

‘And wait four weeks? Bollocks to that. Give me one sniff, Jane, and I’ll tell you if it is. What time does his plane land?’

‘16.55.’

‘We’d better get a move on soon. Is the flask still here? Then go and get it.’ While he waited for Austin to return he fluted bored invective down the line where Dr Thompson and Southmead Hospital were offering him nothing but static.

Keale’s Turkish holiday was over and he was flying back into Bristol Airport this afternoon. It would be good to have at least something to scare him with when they questioned him. Of course an awful lot of people drank Glenfiddich. Few stuffed the tin it came in full of gunpowder and shoved it under a park bench.

‘There you are, impress me.’ Austin handed over the red plastic flask. It was scratched and grimy.

McLusky unscrewed the plastic cup and popped the old-fashioned cork stopper. He inhaled the fragrance deeply and was instantly troubled by a strong desire to put the half-litre flask to his lips and empty it. ‘It’s Glenfiddich all right.’

‘Sure?’

‘Can’t be a
hundred
per cent sure without tasting it, but we can’t go around drinking the evidence.’

‘Am I bothering to send it off?’

‘Pointless at this stage, it wouldn’t prove a thing. We’ll wave it under his nose first during the interview and ask him. Then we’ll send it off.’

‘Because you’ve been known to be wrong?’

‘Indeed.’

The receiver against his ear crackled to life. ‘Inspector?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Miss Bendick told me she found the compact at a car park that day. Is that any help?’

On the contrary. ‘It is. Thanks for doing that, Dr Thompson. I must ask you to keep that detail to yourself for the time being. It’s important it doesn’t become public knowledge at this point in the investigation.’ He returned the receiver to its cradle with exaggerated gentleness.

‘Is it what I think it is?’

McLusky slid his jacket on. ‘Yup. Let’s go.’

By the time they had arrived at Austin’s car the implications were sinking in. ‘Bastard. Now what do we do?’

McLusky strapped himself into the back seat as conscientiously as someone about to loop-the-loop in an open-cockpit plane. ‘You have my permission to panic. Meanwhile we continue to have every available bod explore every possible avenue. How are we doing with the fireworks sales?’

‘We’re nearly through them all. Nothing. No one reports any suspiciously large sales or people coming back for
several purchases, though that’s very hard to keep track of if you have several staff. If our bomber has any savvy he’ll have gone round lots of shops anyway.’

‘Quite. I expect he did. What about people licensed to handle gunpowder?’

‘We’re still checking those too. There’s not many in our area. The licence conditions were tightened up several times recently, Prevention of Terrorism Act etc. Did you know you only need a lightning conductor if you are storing more than 500 kilograms of the stuff?’

McLusky frowned at the traffic. ‘Fascinating, Jane. And what a shame, otherwise all we’d do is look for a suspicious lightning conductor and make a quick arrest. Are we going to make the airport on time?’

‘Yeah, no sweat. I’m using a shortcut.’ Austin swung the car through a couple of roundabouts and dived into the suburbs where he could avoid much of the traffic that was building up again on the more obvious routes. One day soon they would experience gridlock in the centre again. Last summer it had only taken a few simultaneous incidents and the city had ground to a complete halt.

He was keen to discuss whatever little progress they had made, the angles they had already covered, while he skilfully negotiated the network of streets and lanes that would spit them out near the airport. The DI on the back seat however did little more than grunt and for the most part stared past him out at the narrow lanes as though their final doom lurked just around the next corner.

New security arrangements at the airport meant they could park nowhere near the entrances but it didn’t matter, they had arrived in time, thanks to Austin’s shortcuts. McLusky never had much faith in shortcuts and was impressed. They hadn’t got stuck in traffic once and that was a rare experience. Still, being driven was a nightmare. ‘You’ve got to show me your shortcut on the map.’

‘I’ll photocopy you a map.’ Austin checked his watch. ‘He’ll land in five minutes.’