Falling More Slowly by Peter Helton Page B

pace. The drizzle was turning to rain but she didn’t mind. A glint caught her eye. Something square and shiny was lying on the tarmac close to the exit of the car park. It looked like a powder compact. A young couple were walking towards it. Surely they would claim it? A little girl’s voice inside her shouted No, I saw it first! then the couple had walked past it without noticing. Maxine quickly stooped and picked it up. It was indeed a gold compact. It was quite clean and unscratched, so couldn’t have been lying there long. Not real gold, probably, the metal was a bit too pale for that, though it was satisfyingly heavy. Maxine slipped it into her jacket pocket. There was no time to look at it now. She shrugged her sports bag higher on to her shoulder and hurried towards the park.
        
    ‘I was always crap at chemistry.’ McLusky had spoken out loud in the privacy of his empty office though he would happily have admitted it in company. He didn’t understand half of what the report said. He turned to the end of each section and read through the conclusions. More jargon. The Forensic Science Service at Chepstow had worked fast, had worked miracles, in fact. Getting at least some of the evidence from the locus of the blast analysed within a week was lightning speed compared to normal procedure and had only been accomplished with considerable pressure from the ACC.
    Usually there was nothing too complicated about these reports but this time he had no idea what firm conclusions he should draw from the make-up of the device.
    Joel Kerswill had given a written statement that offered them nothing more than another description of theskateboarder. Elizabeth Howe, the second victim, had abruptly regained consciousness two days after the explosion. Spookily, it had been at the exact hour of the blast, as though she had heard an echo that had at last awoken her. If so, then it had certainly been a mental echo; she had two perforated eardrums. They’d finally been allowed to talk to her yesterday. The interview had been conducted entirely in writing, to spare Ms Howe’s ears. The prognosis for recovery was good.
    She remembered sitting on the bench to rest before continuing to carry her meagre shopping home. The next thing she remembered was being lifted up, like in a dream. She couldn’t actually remember hearing the explosion.
    No new clues about people or events, nothing about the bomb itself. Not one witness had noticed a container under any of the benches.
    This much he did understand from the FSS report: the metal container that had held the explosive device – a tin in which Glenfiddich whisky was sold – had also contained an amount of petrol. The device had been triggered with the help of a simple timer constructed from a Russian-made mechanical wristwatch and a run-of-the-mill three-volt battery. The rest of the report was so much gobbledegook. Very precise gobbledegook, naturally. The FSS prided itself on it, which meant their reports were littered with provisos, approximations and qualifications – probably no smaller than but not exceeding.
    In other words, what he wanted was an interpreter. He stuck his head round the door of the CID room. ‘Jane, the university?’
    Austin looked up from a pile of painful paperwork and pointed a plastic biro over his shoulder. ‘Yes, Liam. Big thing up the hill, can’t miss it.’
    ‘I take it they have a chemistry department?’
    ‘I should think so.’
    ‘Good. I need help with bomb-making.’
    ‘Aha. So what did you make of the forensic report?’
    ‘Oh, I think I’ve cracked it.’ He pulled a face he hoped expressed cheerful disgust and walked off down the corridor.
    DS Sorbie was muttering to himself from behind his desk. ‘Cracked yourself.’ The new boy was swanning around the city running after one single crank who let off a firecracker while the rest of them worked on ten case files at the same time and drowned in paperwork and stupid initiatives. The