Blast Read online

  ‘Good grief!’ she exclaimed. ‘Whatever’s happened?’ She threw another swift glance through the open doorway. ‘And where’s Archie?’

  He directed a tired smile over her shoulder at the wall. ‘Poor old Arch,’ he said. ‘Bit of a coward, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighed. ‘Someone ran into me up on the headland. Probably a jogger who didn’t see me in time. Anyway, whoever it was, they knocked me flat. Must have frightened Archie to death, though. He took off like a rocket.’

  ‘And they didn’t stop?’

  He shrugged. ‘Why would they? I couldn’t see who they were. Anyway, I managed to make it here on my own in the end, using the sound and smell of the sea as a guide, but I lost my stick in the gully down to your beach and tripped over a couple of times on the pebbles, hence the state of me. Good job I know this area so well, otherwise I’d still be lying up there on the heath.’

  ‘Alan, for goodness sake, why did you come across the headland in the first place,’ she breathed. ‘You could have gone over the cliff edge. As it is, you look absolutely dreadful. I’ll call a doctor.’ She hesitated. ‘And the police, of course.’

  He fumbled for her hand and grabbed her wrist with surprising firmness. ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ he said. ‘I’m fine, really I am, just a bit shaken, that’s all. As for the police, it isn’t a matter for them.’ He smiled again. ‘I expect the jacket’s ruined, though – just like your bloody dinner – and I dropped the bottle of bubbly I went all the way into Mullion to get for us too.’

  She snorted. ‘Forget it. You’re okay, that’s all that matters. Look, do you want to clean up in the bathroom? Use the shower, if you want. I’ll pour you a drink.’

  He nodded. ‘Very kind. Whisky would be lovely. Can you … er …?’

  She helped him up and guided him out into the hallway, then into the bathroom, hovering uncertainly in the doorway as he began to unbutton his shirt. ‘Do you want me … er … I

  mean …?’

  He grinned. ‘No, I’ll be fine, honestly. I’m used to finding my way around unfamiliar places.’

  She reddened. ‘I’ll get … I’ll pour you that drink.’

  He gently pushed the door closed. ‘Look forward to it.’

  She heard the shower going as she fumbled for the whisky glasses and took a deep breath to steady her racing heart. ‘Get a grip, girl,’ she muttered to herself, but it took a double brandy to calm her down. Her carnal feelings for Alan were almost on the pain level and she only hoped he hadn’t noticed. Seeing him injured and vulnerable only stimulated her desires even more and she retreated to the kitchen and the ruined dinner to give herself something else to think about.

  She turned the oven off and put her steaks under the grill before returning to the living room 15 minutes later to find him barefoot, wearing just his trousers – plus, rather incongruously, the ubiquitous sunglasses – and bending down in the middle of the floor fondling Archie’s ears. The black Labrador must have entered the room through one of the half-open French doors and was crouching there, panting heavily.

  Murray seemed to sense her approach and turned slightly. ‘Heard him whining as I was dressing,’ he explained. ‘Nice to have the old chap back and he seems fine, thank goodness.’

  Lynn bent down beside the dog and Archie licked her hand. He was spattered with mud, but showed no signs of injury. ‘He must have been telepathic to know you would be here,’ she said.

  Murray grunted. ‘Probably remembered he’d been here before or just followed my scent.’

  She nodded. ‘Whatever. Now I suggest you get your shirt on and we’ll eat.’

  Murray grinned and straightened up. ‘Another whisky first, eh?’ he said boldly.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Lynn replied, appraising him with an answering smile. ‘And on second thoughts, don’t bother about the shirt.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Tessa Jarvis paused on the clifftop path and leaned on her walking stick to watch a pair of red-billed choughs flying low over the scrubland in front of her. Seven o’clock and lunch at the next B&B still to look forward to. What could be better than lungful’s of clean Cornish air on a beautiful autumn morning like this?

  Tessa had been coming to Cornwall since she was knee-high to a pisky, and throughout her childhood her love of the sea and the beach had earned her the name “Shrimp” in the family. Not that that was the only reason for the nickname. Even now, she was less than 5ft in height. ‘Nice things come in small parcels’ her late husband always used to say, and standing there in the early morning sun, listening to the murmur of the sea far below, she smiled sadly as she thought of him and of the ten years that had passed since his death. Now 68, her thin frame slightly stooped and her once flaming red hair tied in a bun under her woolly hat, she thought of her youth. Those halcyon days rock-pooling on Cornwall’s wonderful beaches and the damp smell of the caravans and cottages she had stayed in with her late mother and father at Kynance Cove, Kennack Sands and Coverack.

  ‘Dreaming again?’ her portly friend snapped as she caught up with her, panting and wheezing.

  Tessa laughed. ‘You should pack in the smoking, Marjorie,’ she advised. ‘Then you wouldn’t find these walks so hard.’

  Marjorie Lantern grunted. ‘Thanks for the advice,’ she retorted, sweeping strands of grey hair back from her chubby face, ‘but at 67, I’m not about to give up the habit of a lifetime.’

  Tessa shrugged. ‘Your life, Marj,’ she acknowledged drily and watched with a grim smile as the other stomped across the heath to a wrought-iron seat parked a couple of yards from the edge of the cliff, and slipping out of the straps of her haversack, dropped on to the seat with an explosive gasp.

  Tessa joined her, shaking off the straps of her own haversack as she did so. ‘Time for some breakfast, I think,’ she commented, unzipping the haversack and thrusting a hand inside.

  ‘Good of you to buy the sarnies,’ Marjorie acknowledged, taking the greaseproof package from her and tearing open the wrapping. ‘Ah, salmon. What a star you are.’

  Tessa dumped the heavy haversack on the seat and wandered to the cliff edge, peering over the drop to the rocks beneath. ‘Lovely spot,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t like to—’ and she broke off with a sharp intake of breath.

  Marjorie carried on devouring her sandwich, not really listening. ‘You don’t want to go too close, Tess,’ she warned. ‘You could slip.’

  Tessa turned slowly, her face suddenly ashen. ‘Marjorie,’ she said slowly, ‘would you put down your sandwich and come here a minute?’

  ‘What?’ Her friend gaped at her. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

  ‘Just do it, will you?’

  The sharpness of her tone had more effect than the command itself and Marjorie put down her sandwich and walked over to where Tessa was standing.

  ‘Do you have your mobile with you?’ Tessa asked, her voice now shaking as she spoke. ‘Look … down there.’

  Peering over the edge with one hand gripping her friend’s arm, Marjorie’s eyes bulged. There was a shape lying on the pile of broken rock at the foot of the cliff, just out of reach of the creamy surf. It looked like a discarded tailor’s mannequin, dressed in very bright flamboyant clothing, and its limbs were twisted from the fall into a kind of grotesque artistry.

  ‘I think we’d better call for an ambulance,’ Tessa gasped. ‘I think it’s a man.’

  She was right about that too, but quite wrong about the ambulance. Freddie Baxter’s smashed, bloodied body was well beyond any form of medical treatment.

  ****

  Vernon Wiles had been sick three times, although whether just from the sight of fat Freddie’s grisly remains or something more, it was difficult to say.

  The police had been searching the rocks for two hours, lowered down the sheer cliff-face on ropes with a local rescue team as it was impossible to get a boat close to the scene. They had brought Baxter up in a canvas sling in the en
d as roughening seas had raised the risk of the corpse being swept away before the forensic pathologist, who was an hour-and-a-half from them at least, could get there. A local doctor had certified death, though no one would have needed medical qualifications to arrive at that diagnosis. The entrepreneur’s body was smashed to pieces, with bones even projecting through the clothing, and the back of the skull had caved in completely.

  ‘Looks like a nasty accident to me,’ the uniformed police sergeant explained in a thick Cornish accent to his plainclothes colleague. ‘Or maybe a suicide. ’Tain’t the first time someone’s fallen or thrown themselves off these cliffs and it certainly won’t be the last.’

  The young detective constable nodded, bowing to the experience of his much older colleague. ‘The two biddies who found him got quite a shock,’ he said. ‘I’ll have another chat with them later just to finalise things, but I’ve sent them on to their B&B in the meantime.’ He frowned as his gaze focused on Vernon Wiles perched on the nearby police car’s open hatch. ‘Who’s the creep?’

  The skipper emitted a hard laugh. ‘Dunno. Says he’s a film producer and a close friend of the stiff and was out here with him looking at locations. When this Baxter feller didn’t come back to the car after a couple of hours, he got windy and reported it to the local nick. Funny little feller. Looks like a perv to me. But apparently the stiff hasn’t any relatives, so at least he was able to carry out the necessary ID on him.’

  The DC nodded. ‘We’ll do a check on him anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘But unless the pathologist comes up with anything later, I reckon this job’s a dead end.’

  And they both laughed at his cruel pun.

  Vernon Wiles didn’t hear the remark, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have thought it was funny anyway. After Freddie’s violent death he wasn’t feeling particularly jocular. He had too much on his mind for that.

  ****

  Detective Chief Inspector Mick Benchley had taken the call at home while he was finishing a late breakfast. It was his own DI, Moira Angel.

  ‘Don’t choke on your cornflakes, Guv,’ she said, ‘but I’ve just popped into the office and I thought I should ring you.’

  Her boss glanced at his watch and grunted. ‘Thought you were off today? Shit the bed or something?’ he retorted, unimpressed by her apparent dedication.

  A soft chuckle. ‘Not exactly. Left my personal mobile behind yesterday, so popped in for it. Thing is, some results have apparently come in for you on the stiff in Islington. Didn’t know whether you would be in this morning as it’s Sunday, so I thought I would ring you at home.’

  Benchley put down his spoon with a scowl. ‘Cheeky cow,’ he threw back.

  Another chuckle from the other end, ‘I’ll leave the reports for you on your desk before I go.’

  He shook his head unnecessarily. ‘No, let me have the details now?’

  There was a slight pause and Benchley heard the rustle of papers at the other end of the phone. ‘Okay,’ Angel continued slowly, obviously reading, ‘Weapon. Ballistics believe it was a .32 automatic. Possibly a Beretta. Small, but deadly evidently. Hollow nose round. PM result – single shot right between the eyes. Elevation suggests the killer was standing up when he fired – and at close range.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Not quite. Re the part thumbprint found at the scene of the bombing, confirmation that there’s a 75 percent likelihood of a match with our deceased.’

  ‘How did Forensics manage that? There wasn’t that much flesh left on him.’

  A short humourless laugh. ‘Apparently the big toe on one of his feet wasn’t quite as ripe as the rest of him. Good airtight boots, it seems.’

  Benchley made a grimace. ‘So he was our bomber?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘What about his ID?’

  ‘Ah, now there’s a thing. Nothing on our DNA database, but as you know, we also circulated his DNA profile and the pic from one of his passports to Europol and guess what?’

  Benchley took a deep breath. ‘What do you think this is – a bloody quiz?’

  Another soft laugh. ‘If it was, Guv, we’d be up for the million dollar prize. It seems that our friends from across the water got all twitchy when they received the info from our liaison chap and they came back with a pretty rapid response. Turns out that our man is one Goran Petrović, a Serb wanted in connection with the Srebrenica massacre back in 1995 and now believed to be footloose and fancy-free, fulfilling bombing contracts for whoever will pay the asking price. He was apparently offering his services on the Dark Web and he is suspected of being behind several botched hits in Europe and the Middle East. Not very good at his job, it seems. Which figures after the bomb blast at the club and what SO15 said about his kit.’

  Benchley swore under his breath. ‘So how come we knew nothing about this character before?’

  ‘He must have somehow managed to slip under our radar.’

  ‘Either that or our Euro colleagues have been a lot more coy than usual. ‘Problem is, who stiffed him and why?’

  ‘A dissatisfied customer maybe?’ Angel suggested tongue in cheek.

  ‘Or if he didn’t actually plant the device, the perp who paid him to make it, as we’ve said before. Going by what the pathologist said at the scene in Islington, he was stiffed round about the same time as the blast – around three months ago – so very likely just before or just after the device went off.’

  ‘Which adds weight to our original assumption that he was killed simply to shut him up because he knew too much.’

  Benchley gave a disparaging snort. ‘Yeah and that means all we have to do now is to find the shooter, eh?’ he said in a tone laced with sarcasm, and he stabbed at the soggy mass in his dish with his spoon. ‘Only a few million suspects to consider, if we just stick to London.’

  She laughed. ‘I should finish your cornflakes before you start, then, Guv,’ she said. ‘Could be a bit of a labour-intensive process.’

  ****

  Lynn was awakened by loud knocking on her front door. Glancing at the bedside clock, she saw it was after 11pm. She winced as she sat up, the room swaying in front of her and spear-points of pain eroding the inside of her skull. The knocking resumed, even louder this time. Throwing a bleary-eyed glance at Murray sleeping beside her, she pulled on her robe and headed in the direction of the sound, holding her head on as she went.

  It had been a heavy night and she had the mother of a hangover. The meal had been a big disappointment. Much of it had been ruined by the time they’d sat down. But Archie had enjoyed the leftovers and in the end she couldn’t have cared less anyway, as her appetite had been satisfied in a much more spectacular fashion.

  The wine had released in her what inhibitions she had so far managed to keep in check, and Alan had succumbed to her aggressive advances with little protest. Both of them were completely naked even before she’d led him away from Archie’s crooked grin, kicking the bedroom door shut in the Labrador’s face as the animal made to join them. What had followed was a lustful, no-holds barred intimacy, which lasted for several hours and left them both exhausted at the end of it.

  In spite of the pain in her head, her lurid recollections of the night’s fun and games brought a smile to her lips as she crossed the hallway, but the smile quickly died when she opened the front door and was confronted by the uniformed police officer on her doorstep.

  The policeman scratched his nose and grinned when she appeared and to her embarrassment she suddenly realised her robe had come undone, exposing almost as much as she had displayed during her years as a model.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,’ he said, glancing away from her as she quickly fastened the ties. ‘But there seems to have been a nasty accident up on the headland.’

  She squinted at him out of the corner of one eye as waves of nausea hit her with a vengeance. ‘An accident?’

  He nodded. ‘Feller fell off the cliff near the old engine-house. Dead, I’m afraid. We’re doing
house-to-house inquiries in the immediate area to see if anyone saw anything.’

  She shook her head, trying to clear away the fug. ‘No, we … I … was in all night.’

  His grin returned. ‘Heavy one was it?’ he queried, chancing his arm.

  She made a face. ‘A little, yes. Do we know who the man was?’

  He consulted the notebook in his hand. ‘Feller named Baxter. Been identified by a friend who was with him.’

  Lynn gaped at him and before she could stop herself, she blurted, ‘Freddie Baxter?’

  The policeman tensed. ‘You knew him?’

  Lynn’s mind was racing. She was angry with herself for coming out with Freddie’s name like that, but there again, there was no point in trying to deny she knew him. After all, the police would find that out eventually anyway. Coupled with which, Vernon Wiles might already have told them.

  ‘I used to work for him in London,’ she said. ‘He – he came down here to offer me a new contract with his modelling agency.’

  The policeman frowned and she could feel his eyes on her face. No doubt studying the scar across her forehead and down her right cheek where the glass fragments from the bomb had embedded themselves. ‘It … it was to do some body-parts modelling,’ she added quickly.

  ‘Body parts?’ he echoed.

  She nodded. ‘Hands, feet, eyes, that sort of thing.’ She forced a smile. ‘We don’t only model swimsuits, or do centrefold spreads,’ she said, conscious of the fact that she sounded almost defensive.

  He cleared his throat and relaxed. ‘Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean—’

  Her smile was bitter now. ‘Forget it, officer. I am aware of the scars – quite used to them by now actually.’

  There was an awkward silence and he avoided her gaze, finding it necessary to study his notebook again. She felt almost sorry for him.

  ‘And when did you last see this Freddie Baxter?’ he asked suddenly.