A Very Big Bang Read online

  A Very Big Bang

  Philip McCutchan

  © Philip McCutchan, 1975

  Philip McCutchan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1975 by Hodder and Stoughton.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  One

  The curiously shaped bundle, as dawn began to lighten the water between Westminster and Waterloo bridges, sogged just below the scummy surface of the river, sometimes up a little, and visible, as it twisted in the current; sometimes down, and visible only from directly above by the sharp-eyed gulls that wheeled in search of garbage. From time to time there was a thin trail of blood to be seen, had anyone been looking, blood that dribbled from the stained sacking that held the body. There was no attempt at concealment, no weighting to carry the sack’s contents down to hug the bottom of the river: it floated free, making down on the ebb-tide towards Greenwich, Tilbury, Gravesend, the open sea. That, at least, would have been its inevitable direction until it was in due course turned back on its tracks by the flood-tide. In the event, it neither reached the sea nor was tide-turned: it beached. A quirk of the Thames took charge. After passing beneath Waterloo Bridge, along below the Embankment, past the Temple with other of the Inns of Court beyond the Strand, under Blackfriars Bridge and on towards Tower Bridge, past ancient dungeons and keeps, it passed into the area of old, derelict wharves and warehouses. Here were the ghosts of trading empires that had emptied and filled the holds of ships from all the world’s ports, linking the London river to Cathay and the Orient, to South America and Australasia in a grand, vast sweep of enterprise. It was here amid the wreck of past glories, on the Wapping side, that the sack and its grisly contents beached, to be left high and dry as the ebb lowered the water-level still further. It lay bloodily on a small segment of stony, muddy ground, cold, forlorn, very still and silent.

  *

  The day before, Shard, in his office in Seddon’s Way, had carried out a simple act: he had answered his telephone. Yet he decided afterwards that it had been just one of those odd things: when the phone had buzzed, he’d happened, just happened, to be thinking about London’s underground — maybe because, till the phone had called him, he had been about to go home on the network. A tube was a tube was a tube, world without end except during strikes, and that was all it meant to London’s commuting millions — until something went wrong, anyhow.

  The phone: it sounded urgent. Shard had a sixth sense about his telephone. He crossed his office, two strides from the dirty window for long legs.

  “Shard.”

  “It’s Casey, Mr Shard.”

  “Hold.” Slewing, Shard reached for a pad of paper and a biro. Casey came on the line, broad Dublin, and Shard spoke with the handset jammed into his collar. “Go ahead, Tom, I’m listening.”

  “Are you now.” The voice sounded thin, a little out of breath, and, faintly, scared. “Then hold onto your hat, Mr Shard.” There was a pause: Shard heard the flick of a lighter, followed by a deep suck and a long blow. His nerves rasped at him but he held back on his impatience: Casey couldn’t do anything without a fag in his mouth, which held certain dangers for an explosives expert. Casey went on: “I have the date, positive.”

  “Well?”

  “May fourth.”

  Shard said, “Ten days … fair warning. Well done! Where?”

  There was a curious, almost virgin surprise in Casey’s voice as though he still couldn’t believe it. “The underground,” he said. “London underground —”

  “A station?”

  “Not a station. A section of track … this is big, Mr Shard, the biggest yet. Four men, no less, to carry the explosives.” There was a pause. “Look, Mr Shard. I’ve a lot to tell. I think we should meet.”

  Shard thought fast: meetings could be dangerous but Casey was experienced enough to know that and to balance the risks involved. Looking at his watch Shard asked, “Where are you — here in London?”

  “Yes. I left York mid-afternoon.”

  “Uh-huh. How was York, Tom?”

  “The daffodils,” Casey said nostalgically, “were lovely.” Casey was a frustrated countryman at heart, never mind a lifetime in the Dublin CID. “Where do we meet, Mr Shard, and when?”

  “Berserk Strip Club, Soho,” Shard said, “at 8.30. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Casey answered, and rang off. Shard frowned, then took up his security line, calling the switchboard over in the Foreign Office. “Chief Superintendent Shard. I’d like you to call my wife. I’ll be late home. Tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Shard put down the handset, frowning still, conscious of his cowardice. He hated hearing the disappointment in Beth’s voice. It was getting altogether too frequent that something had to be put off at the last moment: tonight it was to have been dinner in Chelsea. Shard gave a heavy sigh: one of the nicer things he’d hoped for when he’d allowed himself to be persuaded into leaving the Special Branch on secondment to Hedge’s box of funny tricks at the Foreign Office, was more time for Beth; but it hadn’t worked out that way at all.

  *

  Earlier that same day, in York, Detective Sergeant Casey from Dublin had for the first time met the person he had thought of as Mr Big, only this person had turned out to be Miss Big. And she had fascinated Casey — who for current purposes was not Casey but Timothy O’Phelan from Clonmel in County Tipperary. Miss Big was just a slip of a girl in Casey’s eyes, barely skimming twenty. The face was striking: olive-skinned, with a bold nose and straight, dark eyebrows. The eyes themselves were dark but brilliant, and as hard as black diamonds: not exactly a pretty face — there was too much character and too much passionate dedication for mere prettiness to be appropriate — but strongly sexual even if currently the passion was not for matters of the body. The brows curved down, forming a T-junction with the nose; the hair, black as the eyes, lay close along the cheeks, curling up beneath the strong chin, its ends played with by slim, olive fingers. The lips — soft, moist, very red and full — were made for kissing, for the things of life, yet they spoke of death.

  Listening to the girl that morning were three men, plus Casey: three of an indeterminated Middle Eastern origin, as was the girl herself. Casey studied them while he memorised the instructions that came from those rose-red lips. Into his consciousness came other sounds also, distantly, through the open window: the clack and clatter of inter-city trains from north and south, the small collisions of shunted rolling stock in the marshalling yard, sounds of peace, the workaday normality of a busy city lying in the bright sunshine of a spring morning beneath the benevolent majesty of the Minster, itself lying behind the security of ancient fortified walls built against enemies of long, long ago …

  “You, Timothy.”

  The words seemed wrapped around by the moist redness of the lips. Casey, alias O’Phelan, smiled. “Yes?”

  “You have been listening to me?” The hint of steel: steel in the voice backed by steel in the shoulder-bag, where Casey knew she carried a gun. Casey smiled again. “Sure I’ve been listening. Why would I not be?” He shifted in his seat, plumply, roundly: Casey was apple-cheeked and cheery look
ing, a comfortable man with a wife and family in a Dublin suburb: Timothy O’Phelan, however, was single — and single-minded for freedom, a fact that brought him strange bedfellows. Now he put on his Irish blandness, his native-expected blarney; his voice became soft, wheedling. “Sure, I never would miss anything you said, me darlin’ —”

  “Damn you, be serious!” The voice was a whip-lash. The girl leaned forward, her dark eyes alight with that strange brilliance. A hand tapped the table round which the five of them sat, like a committee, mundane in a mundane room. In the English city of York, it was incongruous that they should be discussing, mainly calmly and wholly objectively, the death of thousands and the paralysis of a capital. The girl continued, building up the picture, bringing the pieces, the last brushstrokes, together skilfully. Casey, closely attentive, knew one thing for sure: it was outlandish in its concept, in its aim, in its whole genesis — but it could work. The wonder in Casey’s mind was that fanaticism hadn’t got there months before, even years before when the various terrorist groups had started throwing their growing weight around the world.

  *

  The girl remained in situ, the four men left, but separately. Casey was the first to exit. He walked along the street of small terraced houses towards the main road out of York, the A59 to Green Hammerton and Harrogate. At the corner he turned right, heading for York’s centre, past the shunting trains in the yard, over the railway bridge, whistling to himself. It was a long walk. Just short of Micklegate he turned left for the station. On the grassy slopes by the old city wall to his right, daffodils in profusion danced in the wind, turning their faces to the sun. Daffodown-dilly, down the underground … daffodown the steps to dillydeath … Casey gave a cold grin and shook himself free of daft thoughts. Overhead light puffy clouds blew, scudding away to shadow the grandeur of the Dales in the north-west. Casey turned into the railway station, retrieved O’Phelan’s hand-case from the Left Luggage, and bought a one-way second class ticket for King’s Cross. Then he bought a paperback from the bookstall and went through the barrier for the London train. Idly he watched groups of train-spotting youngsters clustering at the ends of the long platforms that stretched away beyond the graceful curve of the glass-paned canopy. Casey was thinking of the olive-skinned girl: she was a good-looker all right, and bad for his immortal soul. He felt sorrow for her, a sorrow that loomed large. She was not basically criminal, though her projected crime was of itself bigger by far than all the crimes committed by hardened criminals in the ordinary sense ever since the Bow Street Runners. Like so many other people, like so many of his own people, she was following an ideal. Casey shook his head with an immensity of regret: she was too vital, too full of sheer magnetism, too bloody attractive, to end up as dead meat at the busy end of a copper’s gun or — worse perhaps — inside Holloway for upwards of thirty years. Casey gave a heavy sigh and watched the London-bound train slide in from Newcastle, chased by a rush of small boys. Climbing aboard, he found a corner seat, shoved his hand-case on the rack, and settled down to read. He read all the way to King’s Cross, whence he took a tube, with more than usual interest and concern, to Piccadilly Circus. In the Regent Palace Hotel he checked into a room already booked in the name of Mr O’Phelan. In his room he opened the hand-case and unpacked the few contents. At six o’clock he went down to the hotel’s Stetson Bar and bought himself a large Scotch. While he drank, he watched without appearing to do so: no familiar faces. At six fifteen he had an early snack meal: and at six forty he left the hotel by the door opening from the Stetson Bar. He went back to the Piccadilly underground — the bloody thing, he thought irritably, held some sort of fascination now — and took a train to Holborn, in the tail end of the rush hour. At Holborn he ascended the elevator humming the Londonderry Air to himself, quietly, full of thoughts of death. He walked to a line of telephone kiosks, found them all full of dolly-birds making dates, and decided it was better not to hang around. Emerging into Kingsway, he turned south and walked down towards the Aldwych, stopping now and then to gaze in a shop window and carry out a careful rearward reconnaissance. Nothing alarming — again, no familiar faces. But the only telephone kiosks free had been, not unexpectedly, vandalised. He cursed under his breath, walked on, and eventually found his goal, free and in working order, a minor miracle on the Embankment. From memory well implanted he called a number that was not in the telephone directory and contacted Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Shard.

  *

  The Berserk Strip Club, behind its many barriers crossable only by continual pound-note proffering, was well enough named. Despite new laws, despite prosecutions and general police vigilance, the girls, as nude as ever, contorted and gyrated with abandon. Simon Shard, sunk in semi-darkness and anonymity, watched with the sardonic interest of a man whose own sex life was perfectly satisfactory: and watched with half an eye only, the other one and a half being on the entry through which he expected Detective Sergeant Casey of the Garda to appear. And his mind was running on much deeper lines than strip, lines deep down beneath London all mixed up with sewers and gas pipes and electricity cables and what-have-you: the mind boggled rather sharply at the havoc that any explosion deep below London would be sure to cause — and that, quite apart from the human element. Casey had said, this was to be big. The biggest yet, four men to carry the explosives. And where? How many miles of track did London’s underground system nourish? Shard, off-hand, didn’t know, but made a guess around three hundred miles. In the clammy atmosphere of eroticism and panting breath, Shard sweated and thought with great sincerity: thank God for Detective Sergeant Casey! With luck, his information should lead authority to a killing in plenty of time.

  He looked at his watch: eight thirty-five. He wanted to be away home, found himself growing restless at eight forty. Even after Casey showed, he would have to contain his impatience a while longer: Casey couldn’t leave straight away. He could and would grow bored after fifteen minutes or so — he knew the ropes — and then he would up and go, and half a minute later so would Shard. Simple … but Beth called. Sometimes Shard thought of himself as a bum copper: too many wife-thoughts. The best coppers had harder shells.

  At nine o’clock Casey had still not showed. Shard grew alarmed, but held his hand. Casey could have slipped on a banana skin, Casey could have got himself lost in darkest London. But at nine forty-five Shard got up and left, looked out for Detective Sergeant Casey all the way down the alley outside, and knew he couldn’t go home yet. He went back to his office in Seddon’s Way and rang the Yard, which was a place where his word was still listened to with attention. He told the Yard just enough, and asked for a check. Then, this time personally, he called Beth and said he was desperately sorry. After that, the long wait and the nail-biting and the total inability to fill in the time by doing any routine paper-work. It was dawn by the time the Yard called him back and he almost knocked the telephone off his desk in his hurry to grab it.

  “Shard …”

  “Anstey, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “Bad news, sir. A body answering the description has turned up in the Thames off Wapping. Medical evidence suggests death occurred at about nine o’clock last night —”

  “Drowning?”

  “Not drowning, sir. Bleeding from wounds received. The private parts, sir. They’ve been excised, cut right off.” There was a pause, a cough. “It’s a habit of the Arabs, sir, I believe.”

  Shard pulled himself together, tried not to see images of Casey, Casey who had really had no need to get himself involved initially, Casey of the Dublin Garda … he said, “Thank you, Anstey, I’ll be in touch,” and then he rang off and sat staring at the wall ahead of his desk.

  Two

  Old edifices seemed to age in crusted dignity, present-day buildings merely to become dirty and tawdry: the Foreign Office — that place of dignity in so much more positive a sense than new New Scotland Yard could ever be — had tended, ever since the first day of his appointment, both to impress
and depress Simon Shard whenever he was called there from the anonymity of his crummy little office among the prostitutes of Seddon’s Way. His boss, who was not and never had been a policeman, had a precisely similar effect: the Winchester and New College background, grouted in by the training of diplomacy, was bound to impress with its product, but Shard was saddened by other aspects of the man known as Hedge. Hedge was not his name, but was descriptive enough of his function, standing as he did between the sheltered VIP who was the actual Head of Security and the common herd beyond the pale. Hedge was a man of infinite capacity for self-preservation, as well able to adapt to the shears as any other hedge and to grow again thicker than before. Hedge could be relied upon to twist and turn in any corner and to contrive his way out; and was ever on his guard to spot any such Hedge-trapping corners before they fully materialised, just in case.

  As this morning.

  Hedge, pink and puffy, waved a nicely manicured hand at Shard. “I don’t understand. Just don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to explain, Hedge.” Shard’s tone was patience itself, though he wanted badly to take pink plumpness by its fleshy ruff, and shake. “Detective Sergeant Casey —”

  “Should never have been here in the first place —”

  “But —”

  “Or anyway — not within our ambit, Shard.” The waving intensified. “Interpol — Scotland Yard — Special Branch — anyone you care to name. Not us! We are never seen to be involved — can’t you take that in? What the devil am I to say to the Head of Department — have you thought of that, Shard?”

  “How about the truth, Hedge?”

  Round eyes opened wide. “The truth?”

  “It’s the opposite of a lie.”

  Hedge snapped, “Don’t be impertinent.”

  “I apologise.”

  “You’re still too much the policeman, Shard. Too much … beat and bobby — that’s it — beat and bobby!” Hedge looked almost coy, proudly diffident originator of the telling phrase. “You must remember this is the Foreign Office, in a sense it’s —”